LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

CfajF 

Shelf. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 






FRAGMENTS 



OF 



Christian History 



TO THE FOUNDATION OF THE HOLY 
ROMAN EMPIRE 



BY 

JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN 

Lecturer on Ecclesiastical History in Harvard University 
{Author of ' " Hebrew Men and Times," &*c.) 



Cujus omnis religio est sine scelere ac macull vivere. 

Lactantius. 




L§TON 
~*BR T 






Copyright, 1880, 
By Joseph Henry Allen. 



University Press : 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



PREFACE. 



"]t /TOST of these "Fragments" have appeared, from 
-L*-"- time to time, in various journals, and I have 
been repeatedly asked to bring them together in a 
more convenient form. It certainly is not altogether 
such a form as I could wish, or as I might possibly 
attempt with a longer prospect of working time. The 
book is but a slender gleaning in a wide field, which 
has been well reaped by stronger hands. 

Still, it exhibits, as fairly as I can give, a view of 
the subject which I have never seen properly worked 
out. In whatever way we regard the origin and early 
growth of Christianity, whether as special revelation 
or as historic evolution, it appears to me that the key 
to it is to be found, not in its speculative dogma, 
not in its ecclesiastical organization, not even in what 
strictly constitutes its religious life, but in its funda- 
mentally ethical character. In either way of under- 
standing it, it is first of all a gospel for the salvation 
of human life. And to this primary notion of it 



IV PREFACE. 

everything else lias been subordinated to a degree that 
astonishes me more and more as I look into its 
original documents. A motive so intense and so 
profound — however crude and misinformed — ■ as to 
dominate the reason and imagination for more than 
a thousand years, and to create a civilization which 
had (we may say) every great quality except that 
of a voice for its own interpretation, which stifled 
thought in the interest of morality, which reduced art 
after its rich classic development to a bald symbolism, 
and made a free science or literature impossible, — 
whatever else we may think of it, is certainly an 
amazing and unique phenomenon in human history. 
From Constantine to Dante that is, substantially, the 
fact we have to study. The Fragments that follow 
are designed as a contribution to the right under- 
standing of it. 

This volume is very far from claiming to be a 
history. Yet just as little is it a compilation. The 
judgments it expresses are such as have been ripening 
during thirty years of reasonable familiarity with most 
of the phases of the subject I have attempted to pre- 
sent ; and they rest, in all cases, upon the acquaint- 
ance I have been able to make with the original sources 
of the history. I was so fortunate as to begin these 
studies within reach of the Congressional Library at 
Washington, which is (or was) exceptionally rich in 
the earlier authorities ; and to continue them as part 



PREFACE. V 

of my stated labors here, with the far ampler treasures 
of the University Library at command. Of course 
I have availed myself, where I could, of modern 
expositors and standard historians, — of which due 
acknowledgment is made in the notes. My constant 
authorities, however, have been the volumes of the 
Fathers, of the early historians, and especially of 
Migne's Patrologia, both Greek and Latin. I have 
endeavored to keep true to the maxim which ought 
to govern such an exposition : that it should include 
the secular as well as the religious side of events ; 
that it should deal primarily with moral forces rather 
than speculative opinions or institutional forms ; 
and that it should rest at all points directly on 
original authorities, wherever these are accessible. 

A brief Chronological Outline has been added, not 
as sufficient for the uses of the student, but in order 
to make the bearing of allusions and events more 
distinct to those who are not otherwise familiar with 
the ground. To the student the standard historians, 
especially Gieseler and ISTeander, to the general reader 
Milman's histories and Greenwood's Cathedra Petri, 
to those who seek sufficient information in the brief- 
est space the excellent text-book of Philip Smith, 
may be recommended to fill in the sketch which 
is here attempted. Better still, perhaps, would be 
Smith's Dictionary of Christian Biography, just com- 
pleted, and covering almost the precise period in- 



VI PREFACE. 

eluded here. But it cannot be too strongly urged 
that some acquaintance with Catholic authorities — 
as Eohrbacher, Ozanam, Montalembert — is indispen- 
sable, if not to a knowledge of the facts, at least to an 
apprehension of the spirit and motive, of this early- 
time. I may add, that this volume is, in a sense, a 
continuation of " Hebrew Men and Times," in which 
some of the earlier topics will be found presented in 
more detail than the present plan admits ; and that I 
hope to follow it by a similar review of the Mediaeval 
and of the Modern period. 

I should not do justice to my own feeling, without 
adding here the acknowledgment of my constant 
obligation to Professor F. H. Hedge, D. ~D., my prede- 
cessor in this lectureship, whose learning and elo- 
quence are known to many; whom fewer, perhaps, 
have known so well as one of the wisest of teachers, 
one of the kindest and most generous of friends. 

Harvard Divinity School, 
September, 1880. 



CONTENTS. 



Introduction : Study of Christian History 



I. The Messiah and the Christ i 

IT. Saint Paul 21 

III. Christian Thought of the Second Century 47 

IV. The Mind of Paganism 71 

V. The Arian Controversy 100 

VI. Saint Augustine 122 

VII. Leo the Great 146 

VIII. Monasticism as a Moral Force 165 

IX. Christianity in the East 185 

X. Conversion of the Barbarians 204 

XI. The Holy Roman Empire 227 

XII. The Christian Schools 249 

Chronological Outline 275 

Index 279 



INTRODUCTION, 



ON THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY. 

AMONG those who accept Christianity as a revela- 
tion, in the most definite sense they are able to 
give that word, there are two contrary ways of regard- 
ing it.- One considers it as an interpolation in human 
things, — a u scheme of salvation " introduced at a defi- 
nite time, completely apart from anything that went be- 
fore, except as the way may have been prepared for it by 
a series of special providences. The other considers it as 
a manifestation of the Divine life common to humanity, 
coming in the fulness of time, and as much prepared 
for bj* all that went before as a crop of fruit is ripened 
b} r the sunshine and showers of the whole season. One 
sees it as a communication from without ; the other, 
as a development from within. In the illustrations I 
shall attempt to give of it, I shall frankly take the lat- 
ter view. 

As soon, however, as we begin to follow up this view, 
we find ourselves quite outside the limits of " ecclesias- 
tical history" as usually defined. Our field is, in fact, 
as broad as civilization itself: only that we deal not 
so much with its external forms, its institutions and 
events, but with its orovernino; and directing: forces in the 



X INTRODUCTION - . 

thought, heart, and conscience of its representative 
men. What we call the history of dogma is really a 
very curious and instructive chapter in the development 
of speculative thought, — that record of intellectual effort 
and error, opening out from Thales all the wa}^ down to 
Hegel or Comte. What we call ecclesiastical polity is 
really one .of the most interesting chapters in the devel- 
opment of social or political institutions, — those way- 
marks, guides, and buttresses of the structure of civili- 
zation itself. What we call church ceremonial is really 
the most skilful, the most subtile, the most effective ap- 
peal to human imagination, as one of the chief governing 
principles of conduct, — reaching all the way from sim- 
ple decoration of altar or vestment to the splendors 
of form, color, and vocal or instrumental harmony in 
a great cathedral, or the tender impressiveness of a 
Catholic procession. What we call hierarchical domi- 
nation — resting on the terrors of eternit} 7 , and ever at 
war with the powers of the world — is really the form 
authorit} r came to take in the struggle, by which the 
expanding life of humanity has been lifted so many 
degrees above the savage or the brute. What we call 
canon law is really the summing up of several centu- 
ries' effort, by rule and precedent, to construct a code 
of morality, and with it to create a new social s\'stem, 
amidst the wreck of ancient society, or in presence of the 
brutal disorders of barbarian invasion. We allow for 
the error, the false ambition, the priestly cunning, the 
ecclesiastical tyranny, just as we allow for the violences, 
the vices, and the shames that run through all the 
record of human affairs. They are incidents in that 
wider, that universal " struggle for existence," which 
is the appointed means whereb}- Divine Providence at- 
tains its ends. 



THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY. XI 

Now, history shows us many well-defined and easily 
distinguishable types of civilization, — Egyptian, Classic 
Pagan, Mahometan, Indian ; and among these types the 
Christian civilization is to he reckoned, — as we hold, 
the highest and most developed hitherto. Oar present 
business is to see, as clearly as we can, just what this is 
in itself. In the stud}' of comparative religions, which 
is one of the boasts of our day, we should at least make 
sure of one of the things to be compared. And this 
will be best clone, as it is done in natural history, by 
patient, detailed, accurate study of its facts and fea- 
tures. These, it is true, are found in what is some- 
what intangible, — in the thoughts and lives of a great 
many men, scattered along through a great period of 
time. But, if we will think of it, the scientific method 
of study — that is, of comparison and judgment, as 
opposed to the method of heaping up mere multiplicity 
of facts — is the true one, as Saint Paul himself sug- 
gests, when he speaks of his new converts as olive-shoots, 
grafted upon a hard}' stock. It is no disparagement to 
pine, beech, or maple, to claim that the olive has a 
natural history of its own. 

Again, as already hinted, this history is to be studied, 
in the main, on its ethical or ideal side, and not merely 
in the record of its facts and dates. Christian^ has 
been not merely a t} T pe, shaping men's lives uncon- 
sciously, like the t}*pe, or law of growth, of any organic 
product. This it has been also, in the highest, the di- 
vine, which is also the purely scientific sense. But not 
onl\* this. It has been vividly conceived in the thought 
of its believers as the true and only solution to the great 
mystery of the universe. It has been adoringly received 
in faith, as the s\'mbol of the holiest the heart can love 
or worship. It has been earnest!}', huniblv, obediently 



Xll INTRODUCTION. 

accepted by the conscience, as the sovereign law of life. 
In each one of these three ways it has been held with 
fanaticism and intolerance. But in each of these three 
ways, also, it has been held humbly, reverently, piously, 
valiantly, and has thus been a great power to move the 
world. The right place to study it is not in its errors, 
ignorances, bigotries, and crimes. It must be studied 
ill its great and brave sincerities, as witnessed by its 
glorious martyr-roll, blood-stained, fire-scorched ; by its 
record of heroic names, from those who bore the faith like 
a flag before the despotisms of Rome or the barbarisms 
of Germany and Scandinavia, down to the last mission- 
ary who died for it in field or hospital ; in the lives of 
its great patient thinkers, the prayers of its saints, the 
glad, tender, or triumphant strains of its choruses and 
hymns, the fidelity of many generations of humble, 
trustful, victorious lives. These are what it is the his- 
torian's chief business to set forth. These are what we 
mean when we say it should be studied first of all on its 
ideal side, and not in that which is false, cruel, turbu- 
lent, and base. 

Again, when we speak of a type of civilization, or a 
t}'pe of mental life, we mean not something that is fixed 
and still, as a crystallographer or a dogmatist might 
understand it. The life we speak of pours in a gener- 
ous flood from its unknown source to its unknown future. 
Scientific criticism in these days does not spare anything 
from its rigid search. . Of course it rationalizes upon 
the origins of Christianity, as it does upon everything 
else. But, for our present purpose, we have nothing to 
do with any of its speculations. Our business is with 
the stream itself. Theology assumes for its postulate, 
that the origin of all life is in God, — that is, in a source 
that is everywhere present and always giving forth, in- 



THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN HISTOEY. Xlll 

exhaustible, infinite, essentially one with perfect wis- 
dom, justice, and love. 

Just how these attributes of the Infinite Life were 
embodied for their earthly manifestation in the person 
of the Founder of Christianity, has been the most fruit- 
ful ground of speculation and controversy. But, ante- 
rior to all these speculations, it is well for us to have as 
distinct a conception as we can of that large historic 
life which we denominate Christian. And this, not by 
theoretical distinctions or abstract definitions, but by 
seeing it "manifest in the flesh": that is, not merely 
in the "one greater Man" (as Milton calls him), of 
whom that phrase was first used, but (as Leo the Great 
interprets) in all of the innumerable company who have 
received and have worthily shared that life. 

Accordingly, the right study of Christian history con- 
sists mainly in the stud} T of moral forces : that is, 
forces which bear on men on the side of character and 
conduct. Of itself, state it as simply as we will, this 
means a great deal. Conduct, saj's Matthew Arnold, 
is at least three quarters of human life ; and when to 
this we add character which it springs from, and aspi- 
ration which makes its ideal, and the education of con- 
science which gives its law, we have pretty nearly 
mapped out the whole field of practical religion as 
opposed to the purely theoretic. 

Now we want a phrase which denotes sharply that 
characteristic of religion most important to consider as 
affecting human life. Such a phrase, for example, is 
" enthusiasm of humanity," which we find in Ecce Homo, 
as best describing the religion of Jesus and his disci- 
ples. But it seems to me that the higher and broader 
phrase ethical passion denotes better the quality I 
mean. Whatever else religion may include, at any 



xiv INTRODUCTION. 

rate it means this. A strong and victorious religious 
movement takes place, when the ethical passion I speak 
of is blended with the mode of thinking dominant at a 
given time. Indeed, a better definition could hardly be 
given of an historical religion than the coincidence of 
these two, originating with some crisis in human af- 
fairs. The passion itself is the essential motive force : 
its association with one or another form of dogma seems 
almost pure accident. 

I do not, of course, claim that this noblest of the 
passions is peculiar to Christianity among the religions 
of the world. In its elements, it certainly is not. In de- 
gree, at least, I think it is, — certainly in that line by 
which, through Puritanism up to primitive Christian- 
it}', we trace our own spiritual descent. As to this, 
however, we need assume nothing at all. Christianity 
at all events has shown itself in the world primarily as 
a moral force. It is this quality in it that we have first 
of all to keep in view in the different phases of it we 
shall meet. Its creed, its symbols, its institutions, are 
what they are in the history of mankind because they 
are expressions of that force. They are superficial ; 
the ethical passion they embody is fundamental. 

It shows itself in many wa}'s : with Paul, in earnest 
contrition and conviction of sin ; with Howard, in the 
deep sense of evil and suffering among men ; with Savo- 
narola, in flaming wrath against hypocrisy and injustice ; 
with mystic and monastic, in rude austerities or ecstatic 
fervors. It appears in the patient pondering of moral 
problems, with the Schoolmen ; in willing and brave 
self-sacrifice, with the Pilgrims ; in endurance of perse- 
cution, with the Martyrs ; in heroism of battle, with the 
Covenanters ; in recoil from a corrupt society, with the 
Anchorites ; in rapturous visions of a reign of holiness, 



THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY. XV 

with the Saints. In all these shapes that intenser form 
of moral emotion which we rightly name the ethical 
passion may appear : its characteristic being, not 
merely that conscience, as against pleasure or gain, is 
taken for the law of life — which it has in common with 
the Stoics ; but that conscience, so obej'ed, becomes a 
source of enthusiasm, a ground of faith and hope, an in- 
spiration of the will. As what Mr. Arnold calls "the 
lyrical cry " is not only a mark of genuine poetry, 
but makes the tone of true devotion, and so is the voice 
of religion in the wa} 7 of emotional fervor, appealing to 
the Infinite ; so the ethical passion I have named is the 
very heart of true religion on its manward side, and is 
the characteristic we have chiefly to seek and verify in 
the stud}* of its histoiy. 

This suggests, again, the direction our study should 
take : namely, that its field chiefly lies in the lives and 
thought of individual men. A great deal has been 
said of the philosophy of history, and of the stiufy of 
histoiy as a science. But, in much of this discussion, 
what is after all the chief gloiy, interest, and value of 
historical study is apt to be overlooked. Histoiy studied 
as science tends to degenerate at once to anthropology ; 
studied as history, its great value will be found in its 
appeal to imagination, its widening of the S3~mpathy, and 
its education of the moral sense. Of course, we want 
to know all that can be given in the wide view and nice 
distinctions of philosophy, in the accurate terms and 
orderly arrangement of science. And we need not dis- 
pute whether either or them is or is not a more valuable 
study than histoiy proper in itself. But, in respect of 
our immediate purpose, they only serve as a framework 
for the picture ; they merely outline the conditions under 
which the study of histoiy is to be had. 



XVI 



INTRODUCTION. 



This is the study of human life itself, — its action and 
its passion ; of life on its personal, suffering, dramatic, 
rejoicing, heroic side ; of its sin and holiness, its error 
and its strength, its struggle and its grief. Nothing, 
in fact, is more dramatic than the life shown us in the 
field we enter, as soon as we pierce beyond the veil that 
distance of time or strangeness of dialect has thrown 
about it. The true way to know the men whose lives 
are the history we would learn, is to come as close to 
them as the barriers of time, distance, and language will 
allow ; to seek always the original sources first, at least 
under the briefest guidance and exposition ; never to 
satisfy ourselves with dissertations, abridgments, com- 
pends, or " standard historians " ; to listen to each man's 
words, so far as we have ability or opportunity, in the 
tongue he learned from his mother, and talked with his 
own kinsfolk, and wrote with his own pen. A single 
page, read in that way, brings us nearer to the man, gives 
us better (so to speak) the feel of his pulse, the light of 
his eye, and the complexion of his face, than whole 
chapters of commentary and paraphrase. 

We have all learned, long ago, that faith is a very 
different thing from opinion. Yet we do not always 
reflect how wrongly mens historical judgments are 
colored by their opinions, or how shallow and poor those 
judgments often are, from the mere lack of power to 
comprehend — we might even say pardon — any very 
strong and sincere conviction at all. Thus of Gibbon — 
so masterly in grasp, so unwearied in research, so sub- 
tile in suggestion, our indispensable daily companion 
and guide in a large part of the field we have to investi- 
gate—the instances are rare in which he has not done 
wrong to the topic or the character he was treating, and 
let down the moral tone of a great man or a great event, 



THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY. XV11 

such as the record fairly gives, by his strange incapacity 
of historic sympathy. So that, in a very large part of 
it, — not only in his famous chapters on early Chris- 
tianity but in his treatment of each critical epoch or 
heroic life, — his work, indispensable for its outlines and 
its facts, is a masterly and very perfect model of what 
our study of the history ought not to be. 

Again, we must be clear of that besetting sin of theo- 
logians, a controversial motive. We are not pledged, 
in any sense, to uphold one set of opinions, or disparage 
others. Our true business is to understand, if we can, 
the men who held them, and why they held them. The 
world of thought and belief has so shifted in all its 
bearings, that we can never be quite sure we have the 
mind of the early age ; while the world of passion and 
motive remains fundamentally the same. Very good 
men have held in honesty of heart opinions wholly false 
and shocking to us. Their thin ghosts do not flit before 
our bar for judgment. Nay, when those men lived, they 
were drawn by the tragic and terrible logic of their 
opinions to acts in our view inconceivably hateful. In 
all history there is perhaps nothing quite so awful as the 
religious wars, the infernal tortures of Inquisition and 
dragonnade, the frightful persecutions of mere opinion, 
deliberately inflicted, for centuries, in the name of faith ; 
so that the very phrase " act of faith," translated into 
Spanish, is perhaps of all human phrases ghastliest in its 
suggestion. I have no more the will than the power to 
exclude these horrors from our field, for the sake of a 
serener view. Humanity does well to hate the name 
and curse the memory of them. But our task, even for 
these, is to see them in their causes ; to trace how they 
were linked in fatally with the train of opinions and 
events ; to see how bad men could have found means to 



xviii INTRODUCTION. 

bring them to pass, and how good men could possibly 
have been led to consent to them as a pardonable alter- 
native from something worse. 

A very large part of our history is the record of con- 
troversies, in which we have no occasion whatever to 
take sides as partisans. Our business is rather to see, 
if we can, how each side was an element in the necessary 
evolution ; and how a gain in mind, morals, or society 
is brought about, not by sudden victories of the truer 
opinion, but by the very obstinate conflict itself, in which 
each party fights toughly, whether for the gold or the 
silver side of the shield of truth. We have our own 
battles to fight ; and we cannot afford to revive the 
passions of those ancient ones. 

A word of the periods into which the history naturally 
falls. The main points of departure — the nodal points, 
so to speak, marking most visibly the coincidence of the 
spiritual and secular evolution — are most conveniently 
taken at the end of the eighth .centuiy, and at the end 
of the fifteenth. The three periods so given, consid- 
ered in reference to the type of Christian civilization 
before spoken of, may be called the period of its struggle 
for existence, of its dominance in a definite historic form, 
and of its differentiation or expansion. The first ex- 
tends from the origin of Christianit} 7 , through the time 
of its conflict with Classic paganism on one hand, and 
Barbaric paganism on the other, down to the founding 
of the Christian empire of Charlemagne. The second 
extends through what is called the Middle Age of Euro- 
pean histoiy, the period of feudal society, of the cru- 
sades, of the Holy Apostolic Church dominant under the 
great popes and the Hoi} 7 Roman Empire dominant under 
the great imperial houses, down to and including the 
revival of art and learning, and the period of the great 



THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY. XIX 

discoveries which initiated the broader life of the mod- 
ern world. The third begins with the controversies of 
the Protestant Reformation, and follows its results in the 
liberalizing of thought, the development of speculative 
philosophy and scientific criticism, the vast growth of 
natural science (far more important to us in its effect 
on men's habit of thought than in its wealth of fact or 
its practical skill) , the great movements of modern so- 
ciety and politics of the revolutionary period, in which 
we are living now. 

Naturalty and rightly, these last are of vastty greater 
consequence to us than anj'thing in the past. More- 
over, the}^ are precisely the issues to which the great 
evolution of religious life in the past has conducted 
us. But no stage of it need be followed in the spirit 
of dogmatists, pedants, or archaeologists. The life- 
stream whose course we are endeavoring to trace 
flows through channels, takes on forms and qualities, 
that enter deeply into the spirit of our own life. Not 
only, then, the echoes of the past are to be heard, but 
its footsteps traced, and its spirit felt, and its lessons 
heeded, on the spot where we stand, and in the moment 
of time when we breathe. For us, its earliest tradition 
is still alive. The record contained in so many ponder- 
ous volumes is not an antiquarian curioshy, like those 
title-deeds lately turned up in bricks and tiles of Neb- 
uchadnezzar's time ; but is like a merchant's ledger, 
which lies always open to record the transactions of 
to-day. 

The antiquarian may learn facts and dates ; but facts 
and dates are not histoiy. They are at best the 
4 'raw materials," which must be "cooked" (as our 
friend in the story-book sagely says) before they are 
fit food for the human mind. It is the very business 



XX INTRODUCTION. 

of history- to turn dead facts into live truths ; to assort, 
co-ordinate, arrange them, find out their bearing on 
one another, and their relation to the life they cover, — 
often, it is true, as tombstones cover the forms once 
warm with ?ager life. It is not that we disparage facts. 
On the contrary, the mind in search of truth hungers 
and thirsts for them. But one must not be mistaken 
for the other. A hundred thousand facts will very 
likely go to the making of a single truth. 

And for method, the simplest is the best: that is, 
to fix a few marked lives and dates, " as nails in a sure 
place." A very few, well fixed, will give us the lati- 
tude and longitude of our facts, and save them from 
being mislaid or lost. I once watched an artist be- 
ginning to draw a portrait. He measured with a straight 
stick one or two dimensions, marked them on his panel, 
took rapidly the bearings with his e} T e, made a few swift 
strokes ; and, almost in less time than it takes to tell, my 
mother's face, dim and faint, began to be shadowed out 
under his trained hand, -which hours and days of patient 
skill would be needed to complete, but with features and 
expression already there. In some such wa} r , if not with 
an artist's skill, yet with his patient accurac} r , we ma}' 
so outline this vast and magnificent field of our inquiiy 
as never to lose from memory the features and expres- 
sion of that life which we accept as a continual and }*et 
unfinished revelation in the flesh of the Universal Life. 



FRAGMENTS OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY. 



I. 

THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST. 

OUE first task, in approaching the study of Chris- 
tianity as an event and a vital force in history, 
is to see it on the side of Judaism, out of whose soil 
it sprang; and to trace — at present in its purely 
historical or human aspect — the connection between 
the old religious order and the new. This is best 
seen in the transition, in religious history, from the 
name Messiah, with all that it denotes as the cul- 
minating of the old dispensation, to the name Christ, 
with all that it denotes as the inspiration of the 
new. 

No revolution that we know in the affairs of man- 
kind, especially in its spiritual history, has been so 
significant as that suggested in the connotation of 
these two titles, of which each is a literal translation 
of the other. One brings before us the passionate, 
ever-baffled, and finally most disastrous hope of a 
perishing people, — the narrow, intense, fierce patriot- 
ism, that had its boundaries sharply defined in the little 
state of Palestine ; the other, a world-wide spiritual 



2 THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST. 

empire, seated on the deepest foundations of faith and 
reverence, and showing the ideal side of a manifold, 
rich, powerful, and proud civilization, which has as 
yet no ascertainable limit of duration. 

While the name Messiah is at best the title of a 
hoped-for prince who might do for Jerusalem what the 
empire of the Caesars did for Borne, — that is, estab- 
lish it as the seat of enduring dominion founded on 
" righteousness " in the Jewish sense of that word, as 
the other was built upon the Eoman Law, — the name 
Christ has come, by successive changes and enlarge- 
ments of its meaning, to be the title of the spiritual 
or ideal leader of humanity. Nay, so instant and so 
marked was this transition, as soon as the name had 
passed from the local dialect into that Greek which 
was the tongue of all known thought and culture, that 
Paul (who did more than all other men to bring it 
about) already uses that name to mean, not simply the 
Person, however exalted and revered, but a Force 
purely spiritual and ideal, — " Christ the power of 
God and the wisdom of God." 

It belongs more properly to an appreciation .of the 
life and work of Paul to consider this transition as it 
looks to the future, and opens the way to the new, 
large development of a religion of Humanity. It is 
our immediate task to consider it as it looks to the 
past, and connects itself with the history of a pecu- 
liar people. 

That wonderful Messianic hope, which in the ways 
of history was the indispensable preparation for the 
advent of a gospel preached to every creature, emer- 
ges amidst the desperate struggle of a little colony 



THE CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLOOK. 3 

in Judsea to defend its altar and temple from the 
stranger, and saves that struggle from despair. We 
need not go over here the story of that time which we 
call the Maccabsean period. It is, or should be, toler- 
ably familiar. We can at best attempt to make rea^ 
sonably clear one or two points of view, which may 
help us understand its bearing on the impending 
revolution. 

Standing at the date of the gospel history, we seem 
to have fairly firm ground on an island in the great 
ocean of the past, or at least to be swinging at a toler- 
ably sure anchorage among its restless waves. The 
prophecy of Malachi, w T ith its abrupt menace of " the 
great and dreadful day of the Lord," — the last head- 
land laid down on the chart that most of us have 
sailed by, — is four hundred years away: about as far 
as from us the conquest of the Eastern Empire by the 
Turks, the Wars of the Eoses, the break-up of feudal- 
ism in France under Louis XL, the revival of letters 
and arts in Italy, a few years before the discovery of 
America by Columbus. A few dates like these may 
serve to help our sluggish imagination, and show 
what we mean by historical perspective. Near mid- 
way, again, to where we are standing, is the glorious 
revolt of the Maccabees, another point in the per- 
spective to be fixed as firmly as we may : not quite 
as far away as the Commonwealth in England, and 
the Thirty Years' War in Germany. In other words 
to the contemporaries of Jesus the hero of the strug- 
gle was somewhat nearer than Oliver Cromwell is to 
us, and the visions of Daniel were about as near as 
Paradise Lost. 



4 THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST. 

I am probably not mistaken in thinking that this 
comparison of dates startles us a little by bringing 
the events so close. But, in fact, they are much 
closer than that. If our daily walk took us past 
Whitehall, or a stroll into the next village to the 
hillside where Hampden fell, the events of that time 
would come incomparably nearer to our imagination. 
How was it, then, with the Jews of Palestine in the 
time of Jesus, who had no other memories, who 
knew no other landmarks, whose only science and 
only dream lay within the strict limits of the inter- 
pretation of the Scripture that embodied, confirmed, 
and illustrated their one only hope ? Herod's wife 
was great-grandchild of the hero's nephew; and 
Herod's handiwork was there, unfinished, before their 
eyes. The aged Simeon might as a child (to take the 
average of several learned guesses) have known the 
writer of Enoch, and he the writer of the visions of 
Daniel. Three generations might thus touch hands 
across the whole space that separates the Old and the 
New.* The chasm is apt to look abrupt and impass- 
able, like the gorge at Niagara; still, it is not so 
very wide but that we may fly a cord across, and that 
shall carry a strand, and that a cable, and the gulf 
is bridged. 

Looking now a little more carefully at the point of 
time which we have succeeded in bringing so near, 
we see that the stream of national, or rather race 

* Thus I recollect as a child going to see an old man who had 
been an officer in the " French and Indian War " (1750-1763) ; and 
he, by fair possibility, might have known some one who had seen 
the execution of Charles I. 



THREE STREAMS OF JEWISH LIFE. 5 

life, flows in three pretty well denned channels, — in 
fact, ever since the time of the earlier dispersion and 
the return of the pilgrim colony to Jerusalem, almost 
six hundred years ago. In Egypt that stream is 
widening out towards the placid lake of speculative 
philosophy, which w r e call the new platonism of Philo, 
— a great reservoir, which was pumped abundantly 
long afterwards into the sluiceways of Christian the- 
ology, to spread and dilute the river of the water of life 
till it could float the heavy-laden bark of St. Peter. 
Eastward in Babylon the stream loses itself, as it were, 
in wide marshes, where it greeds in course of time 
that monstrous growth of water- weed and tangle, with 
flowers interspersed of rare and curious perfume, 
which we call the Babylonish legend, or the later 
Talmud. 

With either of these our subject lias very little to 
do. The learning which interprets the schools of 
Jewish thought in Alexandria has been thoroughly 
worked up, so as to be easily accessible and (I was 
going to say) cheap ; though it can never lose a certain 
charm of its own in the blandly-flowing discourse of 
Philo, or a very real interest to one who cares to trace 
the sources of Christian theology.* The more remote 
and intricate study of the Eastern branch has still less 
present concern for us : it belongs really to the 
strange and curious history of modern Judaism, — a 

* Though Philo is called a Jew, and uses the Jewish scriptures 
as the text of all his fluent expositions, his cast of thought is so 
entirely Platonic or Grecian, that Ewald (in a conversation I had 
with him some years ago) insisted that he was to be counted as 
no Jew at all, but a Greek, quite outside the line of Hebrew 
development. 



6 THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST. 

side-shoot, which has grown, independent of the main 
trunk, into a vigorous, persistent, fantastic life of its 
own. 

So our subject narrows down to the course of the 
central stream, what we may call the Palestinian 
life of the Jewish people. This is, from the outset 
down, intensely national, patriotic, local, — yet none 
the less intensely confident in itself, disdainful of all 
life or thought outside, and buoyed through great tides 
of disaster by an immeasurable hope. Indeed, that 
great miracle of patriotic valor, the achieving of a 
real though brief independence by the Maccabees in 
the face of the splendid monarchy of Syria, might 
almost justify any extravagance of hope. 

We call that hope Messianic. In a certain vague 
large way it dates back to the elder prophets of Judah, 
Isaiah and Micah, who give not only hints, but splen- 
did pictures and symbols, of the Lord's reign in right- 
eousness and peace. When the flood of conquest had 
flowed over the state of Judah, in the long Captivity 
of Babylon those superb strains of prophecy had been 
composed,* whose only fit interpretation yet is in the 
gorgeous and tender harmonies of Handel's Messiah. 
But now the prophecy becomes distinct, vivid, per- 
sonal. Intelligent criticism is well agreed in setting 
the visions of Daniel at the precise period of time 
we are dealing with : in' fact, it narrows the date of 
their composition within some ten years, from 168 to 

* Isaiah xl.-lxvi., the " Great Unknown " of the Captivity 
(Ewald), sometimes spoken of as the younger Isaiah. The title 
"Messiah" is here first given to Cyrus, as deliverer of the Jews 
from Babylon (xlv. 1). 



SOURCE OF THE MESSIANIC HOPE. 7 

178 before the Christian era. These visions, doubtless, 
it is easiest for us to bring before our minds as songs 
of patriotic hope and' cheer, in the strain and stress 
of a conflict all but desperate, rather than expound 
them painfully in their detail, as they apply to the 
nearer past and the immediate present. 

What we have definitely to do with them, for the 
purpose now in hand, is to see how they fixed — crys- 
tallized, as it were — that patriotic hope about the 
person of a Deliverer, who again was (like the "man 
of 'sorrows " of the Prophet of the Captivity) hardly 
to be distinguished in our criticism from Israel him- 
self in his great agony. " I saw in the night visions, 
and, behold, one like a son of man came in the clouds 
of heaven, . . . and there was given him dominion, 
and glory, and a kingdom : . . . his dominion is an 
everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and 
his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed." 
And again, "The kingdom and dominion . . . shall be 
given to the people of the saints of the Most High, 
whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all 
dominions shall serve and obey Him." * 

Now this promise comes close upon a description 
which, by the universal understanding of interpreters, 
points to the condition of the East among the suc- 
cessors of Alexander, — that is, the immediate oppres- 
sors of the Jews. There is no reason to doubt that 
the coming of this " Son of Man in the clouds of 
heaven " was passionately waited for, expected, longed 
for, to appear from day to day, any more than that 

* Daniel vii. 13, 14, 27. Compare Stanley ("Jewish Church," 
Vol. III. p. 385 of Am. ed.), whose rendering is here followed. 



8 THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST. 

Christ's second advent was daily expected in the 
Apostles' day, or has been and still is in ours. Most 
likely some passing triumph Of Judas, or Jonathan, 
or Simon, the heroic brothers, brought from time to 
time that fervent confidence and hope to rest on them. 
And again, the hope deferred lay always ready to be 
evoked anew, and applied to whatever champion 
seemed at the moment likely to accomplish the un- 
reasoning but fervid expectation. Thus, after a cen- 
tury and a half of disappointment, it was 1 just as 
ready to centre upon Herod the Great, whom Antony 
and Augustus had set in secure dominion, — ■ a painful 
travesty, indeed, of the great Hope, when we think 
who and what Herod was, a son of Edom and a ty- 
rant; but how genuine, we see in the Herodian party 
in the Gospels, and in a sober argument by Epipha- 
nius, three centuries later, in its disproof. 

In point of fact, we are apt to think too much of 
the Messianic hope in a formal, dogmatic way, or in 
the way, perhaps, of learned exposition. We asso- 
ciate it too exclusively with the august strains of 
prophecy on one side, and the yet more august series 
of events that flowed from it on the other. We do 
not always stop to think how simple, how natural, how 
human it was, after all. In one sense it is a miracle 
in history, a phenomenon without any exact parallel, — 
the brooding tenacity, the passionate resolve, the re- 
vival from defeat, the endurance through centuries of 
humiliation, that characterize the Jews' faith in their 
coming Deliverer. And so, again, it is a thing that is 
and must remain without example, that a national 
hope has been transfigured in the person of One who, 



FERVOR OF THE NATIONAL PASSION. 9 

after near nineteen centuries, is still looked up to as 
the spiritual Chief of humanity, and whose name has 
been received as the symbol of what is Infinite and 
Divine, nay, as a name of the Infinite himself. 

But look at it, again, on its nearer side, and it is 
not so hard to see — not only that it was altogether 
human in its passion and limitation, not only that in 
its wild frenzy it led straight to a tragedy of unex- 
ampled horror ; but that in its elements it belonged 
quite naturally to such a time and people. In its ve- 
hement persistency, in its passionate devoutness, it is 
fairly matched by the four centuries' struggle in which 
the fighting tribe of Montenegro, under their bishop- 
prince, have consecrated themselves to the crusade 
against the Turk, — a struggle whose issues it is not 
long since we were watching in the telegraphic bul- 
letins of the day. In its temper of stern patriotism — 
sombre, tender, unyielding, pathetically hopeless — 
it is like that other amazing phenomenon of our time, 
the life that smoulders in the ashes of thrice-desolated 
Poland. 

We do not always think how close these great his- 
toric passions may come to our own life. There was 
lately living quietly among us a princess of the blood 
of old Lithuanian heroes — Antonia Jagiello — who, 
with more than the heroism of a Deborah or a Judith, 
led the forlorn hope at the head of her regiment on 
the battle-fields of Hungary. Let me copy here a 
picture which I find in a powerful French romance : 
it is of the hapless insurrection of 1863, and it is a 
young Pole that speaks, who visits his mother in 
Paris, feeling himself dead to honor ever since he 
l* 



10 THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST. 

signed in prison a pledge not to persist in war against 
the oppressor: — 

" Before me was a figure in alabaster representing a 
woman crouched and in chains, with the inscription, 
Polonia exspectans et sperans, l Poland waits and hopes.' 
Above hung an ivory crucifix ; between the crucifix and 
the crouching figure my portrait in medallion. Here 
my mother had gathered all her love, — her God, her 
country, and her child. How strange the position of 
that portrait seemed ! What had that woman in chains, 
that crucified God, to say to him ? What had he to an- 
swer them? But no, I said, this portrait is not I. It 
is that other, — he who had a faith, and is dead. And I 
thought of these things with unfathomable pity, — that 
hidden manna, that bread of life, held in a mother's 
heart." 

This is all over again the picture of that passion 
which we have seen in the figure Juclcea Capta seated 
beneath a palm ; which the women of Judah had in 
their hearts when they wore the turreted ornament 
on their head, " the golden city/' as a witness that 
they should never forget the fallen and loved Jerusa- 
lem. The Polish lady learns her son's forfeited honor, 
disowns him, and dies. It is exactly the old Hebrew 
phrase, " cut off from his people." The terrible story 
of Josephus tells of a temper as stern and high, 
among the women of Judah who fell in their country's 
fall. And a passion as deep, though not vindictive 
and fierce like that, lay doubtless in the heart of Jesus, 
when he said, " Jerusalem, Jerusalem ! that killest 
the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto 
thee, how often would I have gathered thy children 



CHARACTER OF THE MESSIANIC HOPE. 11 

together, as a hen gathereth her chickens under her 
wings, and ye would not ! Behold, your house is left 
unto you desolate." And again, " Daughters of Jerusa- 
lem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and 
for your children." 

Intense, narrow, patriotic, human as it was, the 
Messianic hope was very little ideal, had very little 
of what we should call religious. So far as it looked 
at all beyond the fact of triumph and independence, 
it seems to have been entirely secular, even sordidly 
practical. It meant meat and drink, olives, corn, and 
vineyards, sheep, cows, and oxen, and a vigorous lord- 
ing it over other people. Wherever the Jewish im- 
agination trusts itself in images of the future, it takes 
very strongly to such realities as these. So much, at 
least, we can get from a glimpse or two at that master- 
piece of fancy running riot, the Babylonish Talmud, 
with its monstrous banquets of behemoth and levia- 
than, and its vast clusters of grapes, each clamorous 
to be gathered before its fellow. The Messianic 
kingdom was to be established in " righteousness," it 
is true ; but, so far as consciously developed, a right- 
eousness like that of the Scribes and Pharisees, — 
quite sincere in its way, but wonderfully dry and 
thin, resembling what we think of under that name 
very much as lichen resembles flowers and grain. 

But we need not dwell on this side of it: first, 
because it is sufficiently apparent in the censures of 
Jesus himself ; and secondly, because the Jewish peo- 
ple never since the Captivity fairly exhibited their 
qualities in an independent national life. Forced in 
upon itself by oppression or else antagonism on every 



12 THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST. 

side, the petty monarchy enjoyed at "best such inde- 
pendence as it could win from the mutual jealousies 
of Syria and Eome. The real history of the Messi- 
anic period is a history of almost constant struggle, 
often heroic, and at critical periods in the highest de- 
gree tragical. 

That period, properly defined, includes about three 
centuries. It begins with the revolt of the Macca- 
bees and the visions of Daniel ; it ends with the 
brief messianic reign of Bar-kochab (or Barcochbas),* 
who perished in the final conquest of Jerusalem by 
Hadrian, and the martyrdom of Babbi Akibah just a 
hundred years after the crucifixion of Jesus. With- 
in this period — nay, in that brief space of restless 
spiritual agitation between the death of Herod and 
the fall of Jerusalem in A. d. 70 — I have seen it stated 
that no less than fifty adventurers were more or less 
widely recognized as Messiahs, and were known under 
that claim to history. Lawless and turbulent insur- 
gents, most of them, against Boman rule, or else the 
fiercest and most stubborn of military leaders when 
the storm of conquest and destruction fell. The 
hard matter-of-fact rendering given in such events as 
these, of a hope so fervid and ideal at the start, — a 
rendering of it at once sordid and fierce, — it seems 
necessary to bring into strong relief, if we would see 
it as a natural thing in human annals, and at the same 
time know the real background of that purely ethical 
and spiritual interpretation, which at length displaced 
it, and transfigured the Messiah to the Christ 

* This title signifies " Son of the Star," in allusion to Balaam's 
prophecy (Numbers xxiv. 17). 



MESSIANIC CONSCIOUSNESS OF JESUS. 13 

It does not belong properly to our task to attempt 
a solution of that central problem of history, the ori- 
gin of Christianity. Science is not content until it 
has traced one by one the links of sequence that guide 
from antecedent to result, and is sure that there is no 
missing link. But science does not define or assign 
the Cause, which it must always assume, or else 
ignore, — historical science as much as any. This par- 
ticular antecedent of Christianity, which we find in 
the Messianic hope of the Jews, it is well for us to 
see' as distinctly as we can, — how it was, in the way 
of historical perspective ; what it was, in the way of 
historical imagination. When we would apply it to 
explain anything in the rise of Christianity, we find 
it, so to speak, not at the heart, but rather at the two 
edges of the phenomenon we are seeking to explain. 
We find it at every step in the gospel narrative, where 
it makes an element in the mental atmosphere, with- 
out which the course of that narrative would be man- 
ifestly inconsequent and incredible; and, when the 
scene shifts to apostolic times, we find it just fading 
away in all its grosser features, while it is getting 
transfigured into a sacred memory and an ideal 
truth. 

The first thing we have to do, then, is to take the 
record of the facts, if we can, absolutely without the 
warp of any preconceived opinion, or any theological 
dogmatism. Looking at them so, it appears plain that 
what we may call the messianic consciousness of Jesus, 
which is so intense and even predominant towards the 
close of his ministry, was a comparatively late devel- 
opment in him. To put it in theological phrase, his 



14 THE MESSIAH AND THE CHEIST. 

generation as Son of God was anterior to his appoint- 
ment as Messiah of the Jews. In the language we 
usually apply to human experience, his vocation as a 
moral and spiritual teacher was recognized first; and 
only as an after result came his strong conviction that 
he was the chosen Deliverer of his people, though by 
a way they could not understand or follow. 

At first they knew him only as a village enthusiast, 
a Galilsean teacher, at best a Babbi, like other inter- 
preters of the Law, one of the school perhaps of Babbi 
Hillel or Rabbi Simeon, like them setting the weight- 
ier matters of justice and mercy above the mint, anise, 
and cumin of current exposition. For a background 
to the understanding of his discourses, one should 
know something of the wonderful well-meaning ped- 
antry of the rabbinical interpreters, and something 
too of the genuine and wholesome ethics which the 
better sort, Hillel at their head, had tried to engraft 
upon rt. 

But here was a new and astonishing phenomenon. 
Their placid moralism, their commonplaces of natural 
ethics, suddenly blazed out in a passionate and even 
haughty conviction, — flooded too with a glow of 
fervent trust, a wealth of human tenderness, a strain 
of poetic beauty, which made it all, as it were, a new 
revelation to his hearers, and "he taught them as 
one having authority." All this is indicated, plainly 
enough, in the austere morality, the sharp transitions, 
the strange and winning sweetness, the tender and 
bright imagery, the perfect expression of religious 
trust, that make the Sermon on the Mount different 
in kind from all other existing words, — from the calm 



SYMPATHY WITH THE POPULAR FEELING. 15 

beatitudes of its opening to the stern and menacing 
parable at its close. This we must take as the type of 
the teaching of Jesus in its earlier stage, apart from 
all critical questions that touch its literary form or the 
sources of its doctrine. The swift flow and the vivid 
personality we find in it are the very stamp, the very 
person, so to speak, of the young prophet of Galilee. 

But this is not the person of the Jewish Messiah, 
even by the highest Christian interpretation we can 
give that title. The consciousness of this special 
mission was developed in the mind of Jesus later than 
this, and gradually. If it had crossed his thought be- 
fore, the scene of the Temptation seems to show that it 
had been definitely put aside. But it lay, so to speak, 
very near, and offered itself once and again. With- 
out any doubt he had been nurtured in that fervent 
patriotic hope whose peculiar home was Galilee, and 
felt it as strongly as any of his countrymen. And, 
again, the words of John the Baptist had greatly 
quickened that restless and eager expectation in the 
general mind, which began already passionately to 
demand the coming of a Deliverer. Bemember, too, 
how near, in the mental perspective, was that day of 
sudden glory which had redeemed a martyr people 
from a yoke more cruel and seemingly as strong as 
that of Borne ; and how the name of Elias the fore- 
runner, mysteriously hinted by M alachi, and repeated 
in more vehement strain in the prophecy of Enoch, 
was already current in men's mouth s.- 

Now it was not the words of purely religious teach- 
ing in the discourse of Jesus, it was not the moral 
loftiness, or the strong appeal to conscience, that 



16 THE MESSIAH AND THE CHEIST. 

made the people's heart acknowledge its King in him, 
and so (as it were) flashed back the conviction upon 
his own. It was rather those other signs of personal 
power that went with his word. It was that his 
presence, by some unexplained force, could stir great 
multitudes, as the waves of the sea are moved by the 
wind or lifted by the moon; that his voice could 
soothe brooding insanity, and control the wild de- 
moniac, and charm away the passion of despair or 
grief; that healing went from his touch, and sick 
men in his sight became conscious of new health and 
strength, — it was these things that so wrought on 
them that they "were ready to take him by force 
and make him a king." 

JSTow when a man becomes aware in himself of 
some rare, perhaps unparalleled, personal power, — 
power, too, of a sort that distinctly imposes on him a 
special mission to his fellow-men, a task to fulfil 
altogether his own, and a destiny apart from theirs, 
— this conviction is apt to come upon him with awe 
and sadness and a certain terror. " Ah, Lord God ! " 
said Jeremiah, " behold, I cannot speak, for I am a 
child." But the Lord said, " Say not, I am a child ; 
for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and 
whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak." 

This spiritual crisis, we may conceive, came to 
Jesus not before but during his public ministry. It 
is indicated by his shrinking from the observation 
and contact of men ; by his spending whole nights 
apart in prayer ; by the Transfiguration, in which he 
is forewarned of " the decease which he must accom- 
plish at Jerusalem." Before it, his words are such as 



THE ENTRANCE INTO JERUSALEM. 17 

I have spoken of, — the deep conviction of moral 
truth, the pure poetry of the religious life. After 
it, we have his vehement appeals to the Jewish peo- 
ple, his passionate denunciations of their timeserving 
and false leaders, his brooding tenderness over the 
near fate of Jerusalem, his whip of small cords for 
the traders of the temple, his apocalyptic visions 
of the coming terror, his vague but awful hints con- 
veyed in parables of the Virgins and of the impend- 
ing Judgment. 

These all belong to what we may call the later or 
Messianic period of his ministry. I do not mean 
that in its essential spiritual elements, in its assertion 
of righteousness and mercy, not partiality and wrath, 
as the heart of the Law, this second period was at all 
altered from the spirit of the first ; but only that its 
force was narrowed more and more in a single chan- 
nel, towards a special end. How distinctly he may 
have thought of a national rescue and triumph like 
that of Judas the Maccabee as a possible thing, be- 
fore the great shadow fell upon him in the Garden of 
Gethsemane, we are not, perhaps, entitled to judge. 
If he did think of it as possible, we may be sure it 
was by way of divine miracle, not of human valor. 
There was one hour when it would almost seem as if 
he accepted this conception of the Messiah's work, 
— when he rode into Jerusalem over palm-leaves and 
garments strewn in the way. There was one moment 
when a word from him mio'ht have raised a storm of 
popular passion, and possibly have secured a few days 
of bloody triumph, like that which, forty years after- 
wards, went before the final tragedy, — when the 



18 THE MESSIAH AND THE CHKIST. 

recognized Messianic war-cry, " Son of David, to the 
rescue ! " broke out in the crowd, and " all the city 
was shaken, as by an earthquake," as he entered, it.* 
But this most powerful appeal to the frenzy of the 
hour passed by him, like the rest. And it takes noth- 
ing from the serene altitude of his spirit in the hour 
of martyrdom, if we assume that it was won at last in 
answer to his passionate prayer in the agony of bloody 
sweat ; and that the cup which he prayed might pass 
from him held in it the disenchantment of a glorious, 
unselfish, patriotic dream. * 

That dream — the dream of present deliverance 
from the alien yoke — was shared by those who had 
caught imperfectly his spirit, and who, with mistaken 
thought but loyal heart, continued to believe in him. 
The belief in him had grown upon them till it had 
altogether possessed their souls ; and life itself was no 
longer possible to them without it. His spiritual 
and ethical interpretation of the great Hope had defi- 
nitely resulted — for us, and for them as fast as they 
were able to receive it so — in emancipating it from all 
boundaries of race or time, and making it signify the 
deliverance of the soul of man from everything that is 
evil, and a world-wide reign of righteousness. But 
we know how long they clung to those narrow ren- 
derings ; how persistently they looked for his visible 
coming in the clouds ; what plain words of promise 
they believed had been audibly spoken to them by 
angels out of the sky ; how passionately a remnant, 

* So we may understand the expression io-eladr) (Matt. xxi. 10). 
The force of the cry Hosanna! (" Save now ! ") was suggested to 
me in a conversation with Rabbi Gottheil. 



THE SECOND ADVENT. 19 

under the disdainful title of Ebionite or Nazarene, or 
hiding, perhaps, in the disguise of the holy order 
of the Essenes, clung to the very soil of Palestine 
where had walked those blessed feet which they had 
seen " nailed for our advantage on the bitter cross," 
and looked patiently for that vision of the Son of 
Man, even from the blasted hill-sides of Judaea and 
the ruined walls of Jerusalem. 

But those blasted hill-sides and those ruined walls 
had at length, to the great body of disciples, broken 
the spell, weakened by years yet not wholly lost, by 
which their eyes were holden so that they should not 
know their Master. At first they had pieced out (as 
it were) the outline of a life that in its earthly ap- 
pearing was defeated and broken, by visions borrowed 
from old seers and their interpreters. They had ad- 
journed to a second advent * that perfect fulfilment 
of his work which was wanting in the first. They 
even clung to a doubtful prophecy that it was fore- 
ordained there should be two Messiahs : the son of 
Joseph must first come, to suffer defeat and death ; 
and then the son of David should come to victory 
and endless reign. f And upon those of their coun- 
trymen who had been won to share their faith there 
came a passion of remorse at his rejection, which was 
only pacified, at length, by the assurance that his 
deatli was the one appointed Sacrifice, which at once 
completed and dissolved the system of ritual expiation 
that had made the corner-stone of Hebrew polity. J 

* irapovaia. See especially First Thessalonians. 

t Compare "Hebrew Men and Times," pp. 405-409. 

J As shown in the argument of the " Epistle to the Hebrews." 



20 THE MESSIAH AND THE CHRIST. 

But in the lapse of years, in the growth of other 
sympathies and duties, and the keen interests of daily 
life, all that was special and local in the Messianic 
hope must inevitably thin out and disappear. How 
it became transfigured in the minds of those who had 
not known Jesus after the flesh, till for the Messiah 
we have at length the Christ in history, belongs 
rather to a study of the life and work of the Apos- 
tle Paul, — who was a Hebrew of the Hebrews; who 
" for the hope of Israel " was bound in chains ; but 
who was also the great free-thinker of the Apostolic 
era, and has been the real interpreter, some would 
say even the founder, of Christianity for the modern 
world. 



II. 

SAINT PAUL. 

THEEE is nowhere a finer challenge to the histori- 
cal imagination — that is, to our power of seeing 
things in a former time just as they really were — . 
than that offered by the very beginnings of Christian- 
ity as an organized power, as a social force. Let us try 
to take up that challenge as if the facts were all new 
to us, and we had to study them for the first time. 

First of all, what was the source of the indomitable 
faith, the victorious moral force, which made that 
little company of disciples the corner-stone of a new 
order of civilization ? How was it that the incon- 
spicuous gathering of about a hundred and twenty in 
the upper chamber at Jerusalem had in it the seed of 
a great growth, which spread its roots amidst the de- 
cay of the old order of things, and flourished most 
abundantly when all that splendid structure of art 
and empire was a mass of mouldering ruin ? 

A full answer to this question would cover the 
whole ground of the early Christian history. With- 
out attempting so much as that, it is enough to say 
that every great political or social revolution will 
have its type in the life, the character, the work, of 
some one man • and that the great moral and spiritual 
force we are considering is typified, more than any- 



22 SAINT PAUL. 

where else, in the vehement conviction, the ardent 
temper, the impassioned eloquence, the organizing 
skill, the personal experience, and the vivid religious 
imagination of the Apostle Paul. 

He is the man of genius and the man of power of 
the first Christian age. Comte calls him, frankly, the 
real founder of Christianity, holding the legend of 
Jesus to be a pale and ineffectual myth. But in 
Jesus himself, as already seen, there were* — besides 
the indefinable something which resides in person- 
ality — at least two elements, one of vast personal 
force, and the other of great historical significance : his 
intense conception of purely moral truth and of re- 
ligion as a life, and his equally intense conviction of 
his calling as Messiah of the Jews. These were the 
necessary antecedents of the revolution, looked at 
from its purely human side. But, as soon as the 
movement widens out beyond the narrow range of a 
merely personal and local influence, then the life and 
work of Paul come to be just as essential to any real 
understanding of it. To show how that indispensable 
service was enlisted, and how the new movement was 
inspired and guided by it, is what we mean by an 
intelligent study of his life. 

The martyrdom of Stephen and the journey to Da- 
mascus mark the critical moment of Paul's conver- 
sion. The Council at Jerusalem, which is put some 
fifteen years later, marks the critical moment when 
Christianity burst the bounds of Judaism, and stood 
before the world as an independent faith, — - in short, 
when the mind and influence of Paul had become 
predominant. 



THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY. 23 

But for each of these moments there is a previous 
question, before it becomes intelligible : for the first, 
What was the bond of union amoug the first disci- 
ples, that held them together so tenaciously and so 
long ? and for the second, What was the attraction in 
them that drew the gentiles that way, so that it was 
a privilege to join their body, and there was a de- 
mand for the grave concessions (as they regarded 
them) which they felt bound to make ? 

It is easy to answer both these questions by saying 
that it was all a miracle, and then to take the only 
record we have as simply a statement of the fact. 
For my part, I do not see any reason to doubt that 
the early Church had extraordinary powers — such as 
gifts of healing, insight, and fervent speech — which 
they would necessarily think miraculous. "Every 
good gift," says James, "comes from the Father of 
lights." Similar gifts have been asserted, with sin- 
cerity and often no doubt with truth, by various 
bodies of religionists in every age. 

But take the account as literally as we will, that is 
only to cut the knot which we are trying to untie : 
the facts, so seen, are ascertained, not understood. We 
want, if we can, to see them just as they lay in the 
minds of the witnesses, and as we should see them if 
we could cross-question those witnesses. This we 
cannot do. We can only look at the thing in a broad 
way. We hold the facts, as it were, in solution in our 
mind, and wait for them to crystallize in such shape 
as shall most naturally represent them to our mind. 

We listen, then, to the reports that spread abroad 
that the crucified Jesus had actually reappeared in 



24 SAINT PAUL. 

the flesh ; we see the eager readiness with which those 
reports were received and cherished; and then the 
lingering expectation that he might resume his public 
career and assert a triumphant messiahship appears 
to give way, almost insensibly, to a belief among his 
followers that he had been taken up visibly into the 
clouds, and would presently reappear, just as visibly, 
to establish his victorious reign. 

I take it for granted that this belief of theirs was 
very precise and simple, and that there was nothing 
in their habit of mind which made it at all difficult 
for them to receive it so. As to the narratives of the 
Eesurrection and Ascension, I do not undertake to ex- 
plain them all away, or in fact to explain them at all. 
From the arguments of the early apologists, it is clear 
that they were received as precise and literal fact by 
the general body of believers. But no amount of tes- 
timony would be enough, to the mind of the present 
day, to convince men as a new fact that a body once 
really dead had been restored to life ; still less, that it 
had been actually seen to pass into the sky " with 
flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the per- 
fection of man's nature," as the later creed declares. 
Such, at least, was not the view of Paul; who, in- 
deed, asserts very earnestly the reality of the resur- 
rection and the glorified life of Jesus in the eternal 
state, but with equal explicitness declares that not 
flesh and blood, but a "spiritual body," is that which 
can really inherit the kingdom of heaven. 

The first element of power in the early Church 
was, then, a distinct and literal belief of certain facts, 
coupled with a very positive and confident assurance 



GROWTH OF THE COMMUNITY. 25 

that a definite prophecy was going to be fulfilled. 
That such an assurance is a real power and a bond of 
union, however shadowy its ground may appear to us, 
we see in those sects of Adventists who have appeared 
at intervals ever since, and who, after eighteen cen- 
turies of disappointment, are probably as numerous in 
our day as ever. But we must conceive, if we can, 
how intense and vivid, beyond all modern comparison, 
this expectation of Christ's second coming must have 
been in that age, and so assume it here as the first 
unquestionable and all-powerful bond of union ; re- 
membering, too, that at this point we are dealing only 
^with Jews, at the very heart of the long period of 
intense and heated expectation which we have called 
the Messianic Era, 

But this is only one point. Why was it that a little 
inner circle of Jews, — whose leaders were " unlearned 
and ignorant men," more intensely Jewish, and (so to 
speak) more bigoted and narrow than the average of 
their countrymen,* — why was it that they could exert 
such an immense power of attraction and persuasion 
that in one day three thousand were added to their 
number, and in a few months they reckoned a com- 
munity of five thousand souls, and in a few years 
multitudes were knocking hard for admission at their 
doors, and in a few generations the whole Eoman 
empire was at their feet ? Never in all history has 
there been the parallel case of a growth so genuine, 
so vast, or so powerful, out of what was at the start 
a purely moral movement, or a purely religious im- 
pulse. 

* See Acts ii. 46, iv. 13. 

2 



2G SAINT PAUL. 

A full answer to the question includes a great va- 
riety of things : earnest faith, strong mutual attach- 
ment, a common loyalty, skilful organization, good 
lives, gifts of healing and the like (which they called 
"powers," and which we call "miracles"), the con- 
tagious enthusiasm that often comes from isolation 
and from martyrdom. But the power of the organ- 
ized movement at the start seems best explained by 
what we are told of the socialistic sentiment and 
theory of the early Church. " No man among them 
believed that aught which he possessed was his own, 
but they had all things common." That is, they did 
really try to put in practice, in the most literal way, 
those precepts of boundless and uncalculating gen- 
erosity which are contained in the Sermon on the 
Mount. 

And this, if we will look at it, was of itself a 
prodigious force. Its power is commonly seen not in 
the well educated or in the well-to-do, who in general 
know nothing of the socialistic sentiment and rather 
hold it in contempt. But look at the prodigious 
fanaticism it evoked in the first French Bevolution ; 
look at its terrific and obstinate strength in the Paris 
Commune of 1871; look at the martyrdoms willingly 
undergone for it in Eussia at this day, where it has 
been enthusiastically embraced by high-born men and 
ladies delicately bred, who submit to persecution, con- 
fiscation, exile more bitter than death ; * look at the 

* " Students leave the lecture-rooms to mix with the peasants ; 
princes leave their palaces to seek work in the factories ; noble 
girls flee from their families to go into service as cooks and seam- 
stresses ; and, if they are disturbed in the midst of their propa- 
ganda by the police, they wander with unbroken courage to 



THE MARTYRDOM OF STEPHEN. 27 

grand, almost sublime, even if mistaken munificence 
with which the workinmnen of England and America 
in these last years have borne one another's burdens, 
so as to win some far-off victory in the battle of capi- 
tal and labor ; — and then you see that the socialistic 
sentiment is one of the great moral forces to move 
human society to its foundations. Not sordid interest, 
but uncalculating sentiment, is what carries the day 
in the great crises of humanity. 

The early disciples were hard-working, plain-speak- 
ing people ; " not many great, not many rich, not 
many mighty, not many noble were called." A part 
of their working faith was a most generous, a most 
unsparing doctrine of the sharing of goods and bur- 
dens. Eead the story of Ananias and Sapphira. 
Eead what Paul says of missionary and charitable 
gifts. Eead the Epistle of James, which in its de- 
nouncing of the vanity, wealth, and fashion that began 
to creep in, speaks the very heart of the first church 
at Jerusalem, as it echoes the very thought of those 
who assail most formidably a proud, rich, and dom- 
inant ecclesiasticism at this day. 

A crisis came to the affairs of the church at Jerusa- 
lem, after six or eight years of unmolested growth, with 
the death of Stephen. He was a sort of half-Greek, 
a man of greater vigor, boldness, and mental breadth 
than the rest, and is held to have been, in a sense, the 
forerunner of Paul. His martyrdom shows the first 
sharp collision caused by the Greek or foreign element 

Siberia, march defiantly to the gallows, always setting the dan- 
gerous, contagious example of triumphant martyrdom. Of what 
use, then, are blows, chains, the scaffold 1 " 



28 SAINT PAUL. 

asserting itself in the Church. Now Paul — at this 
time known by the Jewish name of Saul — "was 
consenting to his death." He was a man of thirty, in 
the hot glow of a first conviction, trained austerely 
as a Jew of the straitest sort, and doubtless thought 
he ought to do something by way of testimony 
against these disturbers of the comfortable religious 
peace. 

But his heart was very much larger than his creed. 
How much he had been impressed in a quieter way 
before, by the spectacle of that close-clinging and de- 
voted life of the Christian community, nothing is 
told. But the shock of that first martyrdom — the 
noble head of Stephen, with a face "as it had been 
an angel's," battered out of human likeness by jagged 
stones flun^ from fierce and cruel hands of a mob of 
bigots right there on the pavement before his eyes — 
struck him like a blow. That was putting the whole 
thing in quite another shape. Out of sheer wilful 
consistency, as we may imagine, he proceeded to carry 
out his commission, " breathing out threatening and 
slaughter," and to put it in execution as far as Da- 
mascus, some hundred and fifty miles away. And 
then — we know the story : the blinding flash from 
the sky; the voice as of the very Crucified One in 
his heart, in sorrow, rebuke, appeal ; the three days' 
groping in darkness; and then the sudden, eager, 
glad embracing of a new life. 

It is quite beside my purpose to give even a brief 
sketch of Paul's life, or anything like an analysis of 
his system of belief. A single glance we may be per- 
mitted at his person, as described by the earliest wit- 



HIS PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 29 

nesses : a man's physical frame and countenance are 
often the best type of the personal force he carries. 

Paul, then, according to the legends, was a man lit- 
tle of stature — under five feet high they say, high- 
shouldered, beetle-browed, stooping, with head bent 
forward, his beard and hair at middle life of an iron- 
gray ; his brow wide, his face thin, his eye deep and 
somewhat sad; the dark eye, the marked features, 
we may imagine of the strong Jewish type. His 
bodily presence was weak and his speech contempti- 
ble, — so his enemies said. That his speech was hesi- 
tating and slow, when not roused, we may believe 
easily enough : it was so with Demosthenes ; it was 
so with Mahomet, who, next to Paul, has shown the 
most burning and effective eloquence of the Semitic 
race, and in whom, like Paul, that barrier of hesitating 
and imperfect utterance gave way on occasion to a 
hot flood of passionate and eager words, that stirred 
great tides of popular conviction. How vivid and 
dramatic that eloquence of Paul's could be, we see in 
the noble speech before Festus ; how dignified, seri- 
ous, and apt, in the address on Mars' Hill. But these 
were flashes of power, with misgivings and rebuffs 
between. " I was with you," he says, " in weakness, 
and fear, and much trembling." "Lest I should be 
exalted above measure, there was given me a thorn in 
the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me." This 
thorn may have been (as Dr. Brown of Edinburgh 
thinks) a dimness of sight — probably with much 
pain — ever after the shock that blinded him on the 
road to Damascus ; but perhaps we shall understand 
it better if we connect it with that moral conflict of 



30 SAINT PAUL. 

flesh and spirit, which I shall speak of later, as more 
than all else the source of Paul's peculiar power. 

We get a much more vivid notion of his interior 
person (so to speak) from Paul's own words, than we 
do of his bodily presence through doubtful tradition. 
I will recall a few phrases which reflect the native 
pride, the utter lack of vanity, the sensitiveness to 
affront, the eager craving for sympathy, that go along 
with such a temperament : — " It is a very small thing 
that I should be judged of you, or any man's judg- 
ment ; he that judgeth me is the Lord." " We have 
labored night and day that we might not be charge- 
able to any of you while we preached ; as you know, 
these hands have provided for my necessities." " We 
both hunger and thirst, and are naked, and are buf- 
feted, and have no certain dwelling-place ; we work 
with our own hands ; we are made as the filth of 
the earth, the offscouring of all things." And again : 
"We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; 
perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, yet not 
forsaken ; cast down, but not destroyed ; — servants 
of God in much endurance, in afflictions, in necessi- 
ties, in distresses, in stripes, imprisonments, tumults, 
labors, watchings, fastings, — in honor and dishonor, 
in good report and evil report; deceivers, and yet 
true ; unknown, and yet well known ; dying, and be- 
hold we live; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, 
yet making many rich ; having nothing, and yet pos- 
sessing all things." The vehemence and the love of 
paradox, which run so well with many veins of reli- 
gious experience, show strongly here. 

And again, of the way of life : that had fightings 



HARDSHIPS OF HIS LIFE. 31 

without, and fears within. " Of the Jews," he says, 
" five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice 
I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Thrice 
I suffered shipwreck : a night and a day I have been in 
the deep ; in journey ings often, in perils of waters, 
in perils of robbers, in perils by my own countrymen, 
in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in 
perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils 
among false brethren ; in weariness and painfulness, 
in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings 
often, in cold and nakedness; and, besides all these 
things, which are without, what comes upon me daily, 
anxiety about all the churches." This, it will be re- 
membered, is no idle complaint or appeal to pity, but 
an indignant retort to those enemies of his at Corinth 
who appear to have called him weak, irritable, and 
" a fool." " What do you mean, to weep and break 
my heart ? " he says at Csesarea ; " I am ready, not 
only to be bound, but to die at Jerusalem." " It is 
for the hope of Israel," he says at Eome, " that I am 
bound with this chain." And to the Eoman gov- 
ernor, " Would God that not only thou, but all that 
hear me to-day, were both almost and altogether such 
as I am, except these bonds." 

In such words as these we already find hints of the 
jealousies and disputes which followed him five and 
twenty years, all the way from conversion to martyr- 
dom. It was with much natural misgiving that the 
disciples admitted him of their company at all. and 
very reluctantly that they let him speak frankly to 
the Gentiles in their name. Even then (as we have 
seen) taunting opponents would sneer at his stature, 



32 SAINT PAUL. 

or gait, or the imperfections of his speech. Men of 
narrower culture and less ardent temper would set 
themselves against his innovations, and he must 
" withstand them to the face," as he did Peter and 
James at Antioch ; failing so of his own fond dream 
of a communion in which diversities of gifts should 
be reconciled in the bond of peace, and sharing, in- 
stead, the numberless frets and irritations that beset 
a divided party, outwardly bound together, inwardly 
sundered and harassed. 

The work he has painfully done at Corinth is half 
undone by jealous brethren, who throw out slurs 
against his authority or his soundness in the faith. 
Some officious intruder has "bewitched his foolish 
Galatians" with scruples he thought silenced long- 
ago, and put him to the double task of defending his 
own character, and arguing all over again the first 
principles of his gospel. And it is a symptom at 
once painful and strange of those early controversies, 
that more than a generation after his death his 
memory was attacked, under a false name, by the 
partisans of Peter; and phrases of his writings are 
travestied in Antinomian discourses ascribed to the 
arch-heretic Simon Magus. 

Doubtless there would be something to say on the 
other side, if we had the words of any who were near 
enough to say it. We too, if we were near enough, 
should most likely have found faults in what we 
dimly see now as excellences; should have shared 
the jealous alarm of the earlier disciples at his daring 
innovations on their faith ; should have resented his 
off-hand claim of official equality and mental supe- 



HIS LAST JOURNEY. 33 

riority; should have joined the rest in calling him 
testy, irascible, and overbearing. But these small 
personal traits fade in the perspective of time; and 
we remember only the strong, brave, ardent, tender- 
hearted man, whose very faults of temperament were 
a sort of goad in the work he had to do. We remem- 
ber only that that eager and many-sided mind has 
done for us the necessary task of transforming the 
Galilasan idyll, the tragedy at Jerusalem, the narrow 
Messianic hope, from a local tradition to an imperish- 
able possession of mankind. 

. This is the verdict of history upon him, and it is 
just. But it is also made easier to us by the fact that 
it is through his own words we know him best. The 
most transparent of men unconsciously idealizes his 
thought and aim. In the very effort to interpret 
himself to others, not only what is most real, but 
what is best in him, comes clearest into view. So 
that it is to Paul's advantage, as well as ours, that he 
is his own interpreter. 

A few words may tell us the noble and fit close of 
the story. Some Jewish fanatics had conspired, and 
sworn his death. Forty of them vowed that "they 
would neither eat nor drink till they had killed Paul." 
Rescued by the captain of the guard, he appealed to 
Rome. Naturally, he " had a great desire these many 
years " to visit the Eternal City, then the sovereign 
centre of mind as well as empire. A stormy passage, 
broken by shipwreck on the coast of Malta, brought 
him among a few friends there whom he had once 
met at Corinth : here was the little nucleus of the 
Roman Church. After two years there, busy and 
2* c 



34 SAINT PAUL. 

unmolested, — a prisoner, as it were, on parole, — he 
travelled, as the traditions say, westward into Spain, 
and even to the " farthest isle," by which some under- 
stand England, or even Ireland. When, some time 
later, Nero (as the people charged) set fire to Eome 
in his brutal and insolent caprice, he turned the 
charge upon the Christians, says Tacitus ; threw them 
to wild beasts in the arena, or wrapped them in tarred 
cloth and set them afire at night to light the imperial 
gardens. Paul was brought more than once before 
the judgment. " At my first answer," he said, " no 
man stood with me, but all deserted me ; but the 
Lord stood by me and strengthened me, and I was de- 
livered from the lion's mouth." As a Boman citizen 
he might not be cast to the beasts, or die a slave's 
death on the cross, but was beheaded with the sword. 
" I have fought a good fight," he said, while waiting 
his doom. " I have finished my course, I have kept 
the 1 faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a 
crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous 
judge, shall give me at that day."* 

Recognizing that the forces which guide human 
events are essentially moral forces, and have their 
source in men's conviction, passion, and will, and 
that events themselves are (in a sense) but the reflex, 
at least the outgrowth, of personal character, I have 
gathered thus a few scattered phrases in which Paul 
lets in light on his temper, motive, and acts. Per- 

* 2 Tim. iv. 7, 8, 16, 18. I say nothing about the genuineness 
of the epistle, which is well known to be doubtful. But it is cer- 
tainly easier to concede it to be Paul's, than to imagine it written 
by anybody else. 



HIS OPINIONS AND WRITINGS. 35 

haps, with all these, we should not appreciate the 
strong hold he had on his friends by way of sympa- 
thy, but for those touching words in the parting at 
Miletus : " And when he had thus spoken, he knelt 
down and prayed with them all ; and they all wept 
sore, and fell on Paul's neck, and kissed him, sorrow- 
ing most of all for the words he spoke, that they 
should see his face no more."* 

We see, then, that the immense influence which 
went forth from Paul's life — perhaps the most re- 
markable, considered in all its effects, that ever flowed 
from the action of a single mind — had its main 
source in the character of the man. His opinions 
are of secondary consequence ; in fact, they belong 
as much to the time as to him, so far as they are 
merely speculative. But, so far as they grow out of 
his character, and express, not simply belief, but pas- 
sionate conviction in him, they become most impor- 
tant elements of power. They are the very avenues 
and conductors by which, as from an electric pile, 
that vivid force made itself effectually felt. 

A word, first, of the documents in which these 
opinions are found. It will be convenient to divide 
Paul's epistles, roughly, into three groups ; assuming 
the Thessalonians (I. and II.) as the earliest ; then the 
four great epistles, Romans, Corinthians (I., II.), and 
Galatians ; lastly, the Ephesians, Philippians, and Co- 
lossians. That to the Hebrews is almost certainly 
not his; and the three short "pastoral" letters to 
Timothy and Titus are of doubtful genuineness, and 
of less doctrinal account. 

* Acts xx. 36-38. 



36 SAINT PAUL. 

Strictly speaking, only the main central group is 
quite undisputed ; but the first nine mentioned have 
a close connection and a like interest. They mark 
three stages of a well-defined system of thought, 
which we know best by the name of Paul. This sys- 
tem turns upon two points or pivots, — one of chief 
importance in the history of speculative doctrine, the 
other in the view of Christianity as a moral power 
in the world. I shall attempt here only a brief and 
imperfect exhibition of each. 

I. Paul's doctrine of Christ is not only very marked 
and striking in itself, but it shows exactly the transi- 
tion from the Messiah-doctrine of the Jews to that 
order of speculation which has been dominant in the 
Church ever since. 

In trying to understand this phase of opinion, we 
must bear in mind that Paul had never known Jesus 
as a man — " after the flesh," as he phrases it. If 
he had, we should probably have never known any- 
thing of his Christology. He claimed to have re- 
ceived knowledge of his Lord direct, by revelation. 
Such knowledge must have been strongly colored by 
sentiment and imagination, especially in such a mind 
as Paul's, impressed as he always was by the power- 
ful and haunting remembrance of the vision near 
Damascus. Whatever else we may think of Paul's 
opinion on this matter, we must attempt, at any rate, 
to conceive it as psychologically true. 

We must remember, too, that he was first of all 
and intensely a Jew, in belief, in habit, and in edu- 
cation. His starting-place was not the simple and 
unwarped desire of speculative truth, which we might 



THE CHRISTOLOGY OF PAUL. 37 

look for in a thorough-bred Greek philosopher, but an 
eager attachment to and apprehension of a particular 
order of truth, developed in Hebrew schools, assum- 
ing a distinct historic background, and a definite 
grasp upon the future. The widening out and ideal- 
izing of his earlier messianic creed we may conceive 
as the work and the growth of those secluded years 
in Tarsus, after his conversion, before Barnabas sum- 
moned him to the front at Antioch * 

1. First of all, accordingly, we have the fervent ex- 
pression, in " Thessalonians," of faith in the risen and 
glorified Messiah, and the vivid assurance, which, if 
not Paul himself, at any rate his hearers must have 
taken as fact, to be literally and presently brought to 
pass : f " The Lord himself shall descend from heaven 
with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and 
with the trump of God ; and the dead in Christ shall 
rise first ; then we that are alive and remain shall be 
caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet 
the Lord in the air : and so shall we ever be with the 
Lord." X 

This second coming of Christ has about it still the 
vindictive temper, and the promise of a sweet revenge, 
so characteristic of the elder creed : " It is a righteous 
thing with God to recompense tribulation to them 
that trouble you"; and Jesus will be "revealed from 
heaven, with his mighty angels, in flaming fire taking 
vengeance on them that know not God, .... who shall 

* About a. d. 40 - 50. 

t All the allusions to Christ in the first epistle, and most of 
those in the second, are qualified by the expression " waiting," 
" hope," " coming " {irapovo-ia), or the like. 

% 1 Thess. iv. 16, 17. 



38 SAINT PAUL. 

be punished with everlasting destruction from the pres- 
ence of the Lord and from the glory of his power." * 
This is the first stage of Paul's thought : it is simply 
a vivid and expanded copy of that vision of Daniel, 
repeated as a promise and a solace to a longing, wait- 
ing, suffering church. 

2. But this first close and impatient expectation 
must pass away. Incessant cares, varieties of peril, 
daily duties, the need of controversy, instruction, and 
advice, all served to put off, thin out, refine this grosser 
vision, and irradiate it with a purer, inner light. 

In the " Corinthians " Christ is first of all a spiritual 
lord and chief, " head of every man," soul of a body 
having many members, the mystic " rock " of the old 
covenant, the source of doctrine and authority, in 
whose name believers are " washed, sanctified, justi- 
fied," "by whom are all things, and we by him." 
Paul knows him now in person : " Have I not seen 
Jesus Christ our Lord ? " He speaks of " visions and 
revelations of the Lord," which he distinguishes from 
anything that can be had by sight of the eye or 
knowledge after the flesh. 

To the Galatians, again, he speaks of Christ as the 
Delh^erer who has "redeemed us from the curse of 
the law" and has lifted off yokes and burdens: the 
disciple is " no more a servant, but a son ; and, if a 
son, then an heir of God through Christ." 

But perhaps it is in the epistle to the Romans that, 
after toiling through much knotty and tangled argu- 
ment about the law of sin and the soul struggling in 
bonds of flesh, he bursts (in the magnificent eighth 

* 2 Thess. i. 6-9; compare 1 Thess. ii. 14-16. 



EPISTLES OF CAPTIVITY. 39 

chapter) into the very noblest expression of grateful 
joy in Christ as a pure spiritual presence, felt in the 
soul, to reconcile, comfort, and uplift. It is still the 
risen Christ in heaven, " at the right hand of God," as 
in the old prophetic vision ; but it is now of a purely 
gracious celestial force he speaks, manifesting itself 
in the soul's own comfort, joy, victory, strength, and 
peace. " I am persuaded that neither death nor life, 
nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things 
present nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor 
any other created thing * shall be able to separate us 
from the love of God, which is in Christ. Jesus our 
Lord.". 

3. The later letters have been called " epistles of 
captivity." Paul writes as a " prisoner of the Lord " 
from Borne, in declining strength, debarred from his 
eager activities, very likely in clear anticipation of 
the inevitable end. His thought of Christ is now 
wholly reverent, vague, idealizing. He has given full 
play to the imagination, fed both by the familiar 
teaching of Jewish schools and by the forms of specu- 
lative philosophy that had taken so strong hold on 
the Jewish mind in Alexandria and elsewhere, which 
had come to him, doubtless, in the way of his learned 
education. Now, the Christ of his revering fancy 
retains no more the sharp outline of the messianic 
hope, retains but the faintest trace of human person- 
ality ; he becomes a type of that Divine Energy which 
it was the chief study of religious speculation then to 
personify in some form less vague than the Infinite, 
less precise than a Person or a Will. 

* More strictly, "any different order of creation." 



40 SAINT PAUL. 

Paul does not use the phraseology about the Divine 
Word which presently became so familiar in Christian 
philosophy ; but the Christ of the " Philippians " and 
"Colossians" is a bright and vivid reflex of those 
emanations of half-oriental imagination : " the bright- 
ness of the Father's glory and express image of his 
person"; "in the form of God, though not claiming 
equality with God " ; a pre-existent being, who " takes 
upon him the form of a servant " ; " image of the in- 
visible, first-born of the whole creation"; "through 
whom all things were created, in heaven or earth." 
This eager, fervent, passionate expression of reverence 
and homage, — cleaving still to the image of a suffer- 
ing and glorified Saviour, to one who, " though he was 
rich, yet for our sakes became poor," and " took on 
him the condition of a slave," to die a slave's death 
on the cross,* — retaining as it does the phrases that 
had been the familiar utterance of Jewish hope, is 
the final exaltation and idealizing of that hope. It 
was the one thing which — by a splendid quickening 
vision, by a great surge, as it were, of religious en- 
thusiasm, and warm, passionate emotion — floated the 
yet crude and hesitating thought of the Christian 
body beyond the boundaries that held it, and made 
possible the conquests of an aggressive faith. 

II. The other point, still more important in con- 
sidering Christianity as a moral power in the world, 
is Paul's doctrine of Sin and Justification. I should 
like, if I could, to get rid of all theological preposses- 

* This is the image which more than any other impressed the 
imagination of the early Church, and is most dwelt on in appeals 
as to the character of Christ's sacrifice. 



THE GENTILE WORLD. 41 

sion in regard to the meaning of those terms. Paul 
was, first of all, a Jew, " a, Hebrew of the Hebrews." 
Now, whatever else the Hebrew tradition taught, it 
certainly did teach the worship of "a Power, not 
ourselves, that makes for righteousness." It certainly 
did teach, along with much that was narrow, perverse, 
grotesque, a very close and anxious obedience to a 
" law of righteousness." By a thousand petty symbols 
of ritual purification it enforced the notion of an ideal 
purity as an attribute of God, and as the aim of man's 
better life. And over against all this, conceived as it 
was with the impassioned vividness characteristic of 
the man, Paul saw — what ? 

I will not speak in general terms of " a world lying in 
wickedness," — the familiar exaggeration of the apolo- 
gists, one side all black, the other all bright. It was 
no such thing. The life of Agricola or Germanicus, 
as afterwards of Trajan, shows that manhood and 
public virtue were not extinct in Rome. The stories 
of Eponina, of Arria, of the elder Agrippina, show 
that womanly honor and domestic love still remained. 
The correspondence of Pliny, and the later possibili- 
ties of the Antonines and of Epictetus, show that 
many of the graces of life, and some of its noblest 
virtues, survived among those who either had heard 
nothing of the new faith, or else deliberately preferred 
the old. But I will say, for specific charges, read the 
first chapter of " Romans " ; and, for comment, read 
Tacitus, read Juvenal, read Seneca, read if you will 
Petronius, written at the very time Paul lived " in his 
own hired house " at Rome. 

Against that insolent riot of indulgence his ethics, 



42 SAINT PAUL. 

at once austere and humane, stands out in superb 
relief. What he calls Sin had a very real and intense 
signification to his mind; it forced a heavy burden 
and challenge upon his conscience.* In what he says 
of the Divine judgment of sin he does not once appeal, 
except by vague allusion, to the terrors of a future 
world, so strongly pronounced in the Jewish popular 
imagination, and reflected so powerfully in the Apoca- 
lypse and the parables of Jesus. He speaks of the 
evil thing itself : the source of it, in human passion 
and infirmity; the law of it, that it makes man its 
slave ; the result of it, in wretchedness, despair, and 
death. 

Paul's theory of moral evil is mixed up with some 
traditional belief of inheritance from Adam ; with 
some technical philosophy of a threefold nature,— 
body, soul, and spirit ; with some shadowy view of a 
" spiritual body " in the resurrection, to be free from 
the corruption of grosser flesh. But, apart from all 
matters of mere opinion, I do not know where we 
could go for an equally keen and profound sense of 
moral evil in itself. And, go where we will, I do not 
think we can find anywhere so noble, so -delicate, so 
elevated, so austerely sweet, a code of ethics as we 
find scattered through the writings of Paul. The 
defects lie on the side of social questions as they 
come to us among our political liberties in a more 
complex civilization ; the errors are almost all from 
a certain ascetic vein (not very dangerous to us), or 

* Sin (ajuapria) is conceived by Paul, in strict accord with the 
realistic philosophy of the time, as an objective reality, and not 
merely a phase of moral experience. See Romans vii. 17. 



THE ETHICS OF PAUL. 43 

else from sundry odd prejudices and grossnesses of 
the Jewish schools. 

The Pauline ethics differs from that of the Gospel 
in being not purely ideal or sentimental, but practi- 
cal and definite. For it is to be noticed that the 
Christian scriptures contain, not one type of ethics, 
but two : one purely individual, ideal, spiritual, found 
in the Gospels ; the other social and organic, assum- 
ing the mixed duties and relations of a somewhat 
complex society, found in the Epistles.* The back- 
ground of the first is the simplicity of village life, or 
else the austere purity of Hebrew worship ; the other 
is incessantly conscious of sharp contrasts in human 
condition, and of the corruption and cruelty of that 
profligate age. And, in Paul's exposition of it, it is 
matched, intentionally and intensely, point for point, 
against the degrading doctrine and practice of the 
gentile world. I am sorry that I cannot take time 
to illustrate this ; but there is less need, since nine 
tenths of the best Christian teaching on the subject 
(it is hardly too much to say) is made up of illustra- 
tion and explanation of the texts of Paul. 

But, if this were all, it would not constitute, prop- 
erly speaking, a moral force, any more than that 
average tone of exposition just spoken of. It might 
amount to no more than the eloquent declamation 
of Stoics like Seneca, weak-kneed when the special 

* It is worth while to notice here that the exaggeration of the 
former type led to the various forms of Christian asceticism and 
solitary life, while the other made the base of ecclesiastical organ- 
ization ; and that they will be found represented respectively in 
the distinction, so sharply drawn in later years, between the regu- 
lar (or monastic) and the secular clergy. 



44 SAINT PAUL. 

temptation came : indeed, it is believed by many, 
with some show of likelihood, that Seneca was a seri- 
ous student and correspondent of Paul ; or it might 
amount to no more than the gloomy and sceptic sat- 
ire of Tacitus or Juvenal. What made Paul's doc- 
trine of sin a moral power among men was. his own 
conviction of sin. Here, again, I have to use a theo- 
logical phrase, reluctantly, because there is no other. 
But the fact itself is easy to see in a study of the 
man. A certain nervous and morbid temperament, 
native in him, was prone to exaggerate whatever 
touched personal feeling; his strict training' in the 
Law made him intensely conscious of whatever bore 
on personal conduct; a certain eagerness to assume 
responsibility, to make any given task his own, is 
seen in his hasty undertaking of the charge to crush 
the Galilsean heresy at a blow. But here was the one 
horrible thing which he could never hide or disguise : 
that battered head, that crushed and bleeding form of 
the martyr Stephen, and he standing by, eagerly " con- 
senting to his death." That one thing, in his eyes, 
made him — no, showed him — "the chief of sin- 
ners " ; and it is as if we saw him with his head 
bowed and his face hidden, when he says, "I am 
meanest of the apostles, and not worthy to be called 
an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God." 

The germ of his moral power lay in this, then, that 
he frankly rated himself — not simply by self-con- 
demnation and regret, but by passionate and deep 
contrition — among the very ones who most needed 
the deliverance he announced. To exhibit this point 
fully it would be necessary to show those symptoms 



HIS EELIGIOUS CONVICTION. 45 

of a strange and eager craving for expiation by any 
sort of religious rite, common alike in the Jewish 
and Pagan world.* The real expiation, the only ex- 
piation possible, Paul taught, — and he taught it with 
conviction and with power because he kneiv it, — must 
be found in a crisis of religious experience, and come 
from an act of faith. All this is wrapped about in 
" Galatians " with strange subtilties of argument that 
mean nothing to us. It is joined in " Corinthians " 
with technical points of anthropology, and curious 
glimpses of personal experience. It is wrought up 
in " Eomans " into the most intense and passionate 
expression of the burden and the terror of a soul 
confronted with the awful law of holiness : " 
wretched man that I am ! who shall deliver me from 
the body of this death ? " And then the peace, sudden 
and sweet as a child's sleep after an agony of fright, 
when once the reconciling moment has' come : " The 
Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we 
are the children of God ; and if children, then heirs, — 
heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ ! — that if we 
suffer with him we may be also glorified together." 

So, with all the wickedness and the bondage that 
confronted him in the spectacle of the world as it 
was, — the gods all dying or dead, old pagan faiths 
fast fadiDg out, political freedom perished, a frenzy 
of vice and a gloom of superstition invading all the 
sanctuaries of human life, — Paul was able to appeal 
in the tone of absolute conviction, courage and hope. 
Whatever was bitter and intolerable in the evil of 
the world, he had shared it too. Whatever of good- 

* See below, pp. 98, 99. 



46 SAINT PAUL. 

ness men despaired of, he not only believed in, but 
knew as a fact in his own life : it had broken upon 
him as a great light out of a black cloud ; and so he 
could change their sullen despondency into an im- 
measurable and glorious hope. 

For the present these are the elements of power 
which we have to recognize in the life of Paul. I do 
not add to them that activity in the building up of 
churches, and their regulation; in which so much of 
his work consisted : first, because, when the convic- 
tion and the brotherhood are strong enough, they will 
make their own organized forms at any rate; and 
secondly, because that model organization of the 
church at Eome, which was presently to embody all 
of Christianity that men knew or cared about, in- 
cluded so many other elements of power that we 
hardly think of it as an apostolic work at all. To 
discuss the forms and the beliefs of the little religious 
communities which were all Paul knew, would be 
mere antiquarianism. It is in no antiquarian tem- 
per, but as students of those great permanent forces 
which did once and can again move the world, and 
create new systems and societies on the ruins of the 
old, that we should try to understand the genius, the 
life, and the work of the Apostle Paul. 



III. 

CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND 
CENTURY. 

WHEN we shift our view to the second Christian 
century, the first thing that arrests . us is the 
wide gulf that parts us from the comparatively clear 
ground of the apostolic period. The interval between 
the last of Paul's undisputed epistles and the first of 
the extant apologists is something more than eighty 
years. It is hardly too much to say that that whole 
space is covered with a heavy mist, out of which, at 
its close, a few well-defined figures are seen emerging. 
Any bridge across it must be built, so to speak, " in 
the air." We can erect our two towers', but the cables 
will not meet. 

Now this period of eighty years is precisely that 
covered by unsettled controversies respecting the au- 
thenticity, date, and authorship of the later New Tes- 
tament writings, including all the Four Gospels ; or 
illustrated by historical glimpses so dim and few that 
a chance notice of Tacitus and an official letter of 
Pliny become our most instructive documents. The 
gulf hides, so to speak, the very secret of Christianity 
itself; for, as we shall see further on, what we find in 
germ only in the apostolic period — in particular, the 
identification of the Logos with the person of Jesus — 



48 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 

then took root and substance and form. This subter- 
ranean life of the first Christian age has its most 
touching symbol in the name which belongs to just 
that period, when those germs were brooding there, — 
"the Church of the Catacombs." Of course we do 
not forget the beauty and interest of the few half- 
legendary accounts we have of this period, or the 
purely religious value of some of the writings of the 
so-called Apostolic Fathers. But, for purposes of 
strict consecutive history, it is not too much to say 
that we have to jump a gulf of more than eighty 
years. 

This statement should not be taken for more than 
it distinctly asserts. Its limitation is in the phrase 
" strict consecutive history." The period spoken of 
has even a rich literature of its own, including all the 
Gospels (probably), as well as several of the later 
Epistles, the Apocalypse, and the Apostolic Fathers. 
But the authorship or date of few if any of these is 
quite undisputed ; while the events of the period are 
almost all in good part legendary or apocryphal. The 
existence of the gulf is recognized by all historians ; 
but its importance in the history of doctrinal develop- 
ment is not always sufficiently considered. 

Now the existence of this gulf is not a thing to be 
particularly wondered at. A very nearly parallel 
case occurs close by in the strange intellectual slum- 
ber which fell upon the Eoman mind after the storms 
of the Eepublic had subsided to a sullen peace, and 
which lasted for near a century. Virgil and Horace 
had both found shelter from those storms in the 
patronage of Augustus ; Ovid was born the year 



A PERIOD OF SILENCE. 49 

that Cicero died. After these court poets passed 
away, only here and there a satire, or a moral essay, 
or a discourse of rhetoric, breaks the long silence, till 
comparative liberty and security brought with it the 
great writers of the silver age. Anecdote and legend, 
often apocryphal and obscure, are what make most of 
such history as we have of the earlier Caesars and 
their age. So that the forty years during which Pal- 
estine comes into strong relief — counting from 
Matthew to Josephus — make a sort of oasis in a 
century extraordinarily barren of events or men, 
though in the full glare of all the imperial splendor 
and all the ostentatious luxury of the Eome of the 
Csesars. 

I do not propose to go into any of the literary con- 
troversies, or any of the curious antiquarian research, 
that belong to this obscure period. My business is 
simply with what we find in the condition of Chris- 
tian thought at the end of it. For we must not, at all 
events, suppose that thought was idle during all those 
years. On the contrary, there must have been a 
mental movement going on, whose activity and inten- 
sity are but feebly reflected to us, — partly in a few 
stray expressions gathered from epistle or anecdote, 
but more distinctly (as hinted before) in the figures 
seen emerging from the mist that overhangs the 
gulf. 

In fact, the period may be best described as one of 
an intense, warm, brooding life. It was a period of 
incubation, during which were evolved in dim embryo 
the types that shaped the theological conflicts of many 
an after age. Landed well on this side of it, we find 

3 



50 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 

the Logos doctrine fully developed, — shaped, indeed, 
into a pretty well defined trinity in Justin and 
Athenagoras, who appeal to intelligent pagans (like 
Aurelius) to recognize it as a theism at least as good 
as the Greek pantheon.* It is not of the slightest con- 
sequence whether we date this Logos doctrine from 
Philo, before the gospel times,f or from John, towards 
the end of the first century, or from Christian specu- 
lative schools, early in the second. What we have to 
observe is, that it has already reached a degree of 
maturity to which later controversies or councils can 
only add a few finishing touches by way of exacter 
definition ; and that the mission of Jesus, on its divine 
or providential side, has already become thoroughly 
identified, in a certain personal, exclusive, and dog- 
matic sense, with the advent of that Logos which, 
existing with God from the beginning, and in its own 
nature divine, " was made flesh " in him. The source 
of this conviction is not at present under discussion ; 

* This is not the same as the developed trinity of the later 
creeds : in particular, the distinction between the Logos and the Holy 
Spirit is quite undefined. The words of Justin are : " Both Him 
[God] and the Son who came forth from him and taught us these 
things, and the host of the other good angels, who follow and are 
made like to him, and the prophetic Spirit, we worship and adore." 
Athenagoras says (Chap. 10), " Who would not be astonished, to 
hear men called atheists, who speak of the Father God and of the 
Son God and of the Holy Spirit, and who declare both their power in 
union and their distinction in order ? . . . The Son [is] in the Father, 
and the Father in the Son, by unity and power of Spirit. Mind 
and Reason of the Father [is] the Son of God." This last expres- 
sion should be particularly noted, as very characteristic of the 
thought of the age. 

t See the illustrations in " Hebrew Men and Times," pp. 374, 
375. 



THE DOCTRINE OF REDEMPTION. 51 

but its existence at this time, with whatever empha- 
sis or whatever fulness my words have already im- 
plied, is the fact to be distinctly seen. The time I 
refer to is from about A. D. 150, the date of Justin's 
first Apology, to that of Athenagoras, about 175. 

One other thing before we come to the sharper 
characteristics of Christian thought at this time. The 
descent of the Logos, in the person of Jesus, was for a 
special work of redemption, or emancipation from the 
dominion of Evil. This is, of course, a simple com- 
monplace of Christian theology. But look at it a 
moment, attentively, and it seems to connect itself by 
natural evolution with two things : first, the Jewish 
expectation of a national deliverance, of which enough 
has been said before ; and, second, the drift of Greek, 
speculation, more particularly during the three hun- 
dred years previous. That vein of scepticism as to 
ultimate truth, which crops out in Euripides and in 
Socrates, took a new turn after the great speculative 
period of Plato and his school : it turned men's minds 
to moral problems, and the search for the " chief end 
of man," or the highest good. Naturally, this made 
them keenly conscious of existing evil ; and the prob- 
lem of philosophy more and more was the problem of 
escape from it, — the Epicureans by way of acquies- 
cence, and the Stoics by way of defiance. The Epi- 
cureans preached contentment and placidity of soul. 
The Stoics kept asserting that evil is only in the 
seeming, as if they hoped by incessant repetition to 
convince themselves that it is so : in some of Cicero's 
dialogues, for instance (as the Fifth Tusculan), it is 
almost startling to find a rehearsal, as it were, of the 



52 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 

early Christian creed of emancipation of the soul by 
martyrdom for the truth. 

"The whole creation," says Paul, "groaneth and 
travaileth in pain together until now, waiting to be 
delivered." So that the interest with which the claims 
of Christianity were listened to from the first was 
something more than a speculative interest in some 
new theory as to the Divine nature and the law of 
life. So far as the gospel was true at all, it was true 
as a gospel of Salvation, — that is, of actual rescue 
from an actual calamity. That calamity was felt to 
be in the very conditions of life upon this earth, as 
men have received them. That rescue receded more 
and more, in men's thought, from the notion of any 
special deliverance, such (for example) as the Jews 
hoped, which did needful service as scaffolding for a 
time. 

The thought of it became inevitably, more and 
more, an intense craving and yearning : as they be- 
held, on one side, the political bondage, the insecurity 
and terror, the frequent crises of great suffering, the 
moral corruption of society, the doom of death that 
overhung the world like a pall ; or dreamed, on the 
other hand, of a possible realm of liberty and bliss. 
The very despair that fell on their souls, when the 
golden age that Yirgil looked for under Augustus, or 
that Galilsean zealots promised in a revolt from Rome, 
was set against the terrible reality men saw. Their 
very despair made them long and ask more passion- 
ately for whatever hope might be given them in the 
faith which now claimed to be the one and final 
refuge. 



TWO MODES OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT. 53 

We have, I say, to conceive of this, or something 
like it, as the process going on, during those long years 
of silence, in the class of minds most apt to entertain 
such thoughts. The bland moralisms of Seneca, the 
scornful satire of Juvenal, the caustic portraiture of 
Tacitus, the frank urbanity of Pliny, the light mockery 
of Lucian, need not deceive us as to what was really 
brooding in the mind of the age. An anecdote of 
Josephus, a hint in Plutarch's Morals, a reminiscence 
of Justin, is far more likely to reflect the mood of 
mind sure to show itself in the next great evolution 
of human thought, than the phrases of those haughty 
arid cultured men. What comes into literature is not 
merely, and not even so much, the emotion or opinion 
of the hour ; but, rather, what has been brooded on in 
silence for one generation, before it comes into speech 
in the next, and then goes into the common inherit- 
ance of mankind. 

That this is the right view to take of the long 
interval before spoken of is shown, at any rate, by 
the very remarkable twofold nature of the phenome- 
non before us, as soon as the mist is lifted, and we find 
ourselves in daylight again, amongst articulating men. 
The phenomenon, I repeat, is not single, but twofold. 
It is signified to us in the names of the two groups 
that stand most distinctly before us at the middle of 
the second century : one, a school already fading or 
becoming extinct, and known to us only through the 
attacks or confutations of its opponents ; the other, a 
company of men who speak to us very earnestly the 
mind of the early Church, and have traced in clear 
outline the speculative or moral doctrine to be filled 



54 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 

in by later times. I mean the Gnostics and the 
Apologists. 

I shall not attempt to add another to the many ex- 
positions of the tedious and fantastic schemes known 
as Gnosticism. For myself, not only I can get into 
my mind no intelligible meaning from those " endless 
genealogies," as Irenseus states them, but I cannot 
easily imagine that any sane mind should hold them 
as sober matter of opinion, much less take them as the 
real expression of objective truth. The form these 
speculations took seems to me perfectly worthless as 
serving to interpret to our mind what the cast of 
opinion really was, except as an eccentric style of 
mere symbolism, or mere analysis. I will say a word 
of this presently. But, in the mean time, there are 
two points which it seems to me no more than fair to 
keep in view, if we would do justice to the men who 
held to the Gnostic sects; that is, if we would not 
think of them as mere men of straw, lay figures, 
decked with impossible habiliments, which we have 
no occasion to think of as serving any of the uses of 
human life. 

The first point is, that Gnosticism is a genuine and 
legitimate outgrowth of the same general movement 
of thought which shaped the Christian dogma. Quite 
evidently, it regarded itself as the true interpretation 
of the Gospel, and for a generation or more disputed 
its title to be that interpretation on even terms with 
the more orthodox view. Why it eventually failed, 
even dishonorably failed, I shall consider presently. 

Perhaps the first thing that we find hard to recon- 
cile to our mind is the extremely early date at which it 



WHAT WAS GNOSTICISM ? 55 

appears. The Epistles of the Testament contain many 
unmistakable hints and traces of it * Within fifty 
years after some of those epistles were written it was 
already on the wane, and in thirty years more it was 
dead. Yet in the interval it had been a full-fledged 
philosophy, pretentious and superb as the New Pla- 
tonism which it helped serve to introduce, and seems 
to caricature. Not a vestige of it remains, except in 
fragments and echoes in the writings of its assailants. 
But, if we think of it, the very fact that its germs 
already existed in the apostolic time is what helps 
explain it. It was, in a sense, the double or anti- 
type of Christianity, — a reflex in men's speculative 
thought of the same Life which the Church embodied 
in another way. 

In the second place, it was unquestionably sincere, 

— not a profane mockery and travesty of the truth. 
It had not, apparently, the highest order of sincerity: 
it does not appear that any of the Gnostics held any 
truth so sacred that they were ready to die for it. • 
But that lay in- their conception of truth itself. Men 
do not die for an opinion: they die for a faith. Gnosis, 
after all, was " opinion," not " knowledge," much less 
faith. Still, it was an opinion bravely and loyally 
held, in spite of odium and hostility ; and it persist- 
ently called itself " Christian," at a time when the 
Christian name was apt to invite official suspicion or 
popular rage. Moreover — at least in its riper forms 

— it had two marked features of a high order of sin- 
cerity, even if not the highest. It had a discipline of 

* See, for example, Colossians i. 15, et seq., especially the ex- 
pressions ttuv rb Tr\T]pio/j.a (i. 19), and 6r]<ra.vpb'i ttjs yuuaeus (ii. 3). 



56 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTUEY. 

its own, often scrupulously ascetic and severe ; and it 
cultivated the religious sentiment, in harmony doubt- 
less with its own style of thought, with abundant 
seeming fervor. It had hymns of its own, whole vol- 
umes of them, while orthodox Christians still con- 
tented themselves with Jewish Psalms. Thus in all 
outward seeming — except its incoherent variety of 
sects — it might well appear not only Christian, which 
in vehement profession (at least) it was, but a full- 
grown, highly developed form of religion, amply en- 
titled to hold its own with its antagonist. Nay, its 
very variety of sects is something more than mere 
license of speculation, or an untimely birth of " free 
religion." It is a testimony to something ingenuous 
and spontaneous in its acceptance of the Christian 
name. It is at least as good an evidence of genuine- 
ness and sincerity as that unity of creed, enforced by 
ecclesiastical authority or social penalties, by which 
the Church has always vindicated its claim of truth.* 
So much it seemed necessary to say, for historical 
justice' sake, of those outlying groups of independent 
thinkers, who make the strangest problem of early 
Christianity. But it is also necessary to go one step 
further, — to say not only why Gnosticism failed as 
an interpreter of the new religious life, but why it has 
justly been under the ban of more serious believers. 
And this is not because of the scandals and immoral- 
ities charged against it. Odium at least as bad lay 
just as heavily against the Christian body at large ; 

* As an instructive commentary on the supposed unity and 
harmony of the first Christian age, Epiphanius gives us a list of 
forty-three distinct "heresies" (including the Gnostic), belonging 
to the period under review. 



THE SPECULATIVE GNOSIS. 57 

and, if that had gone down in the great persecution, 
it would have gone down with a black stigma on its 
name, which could never have been washed off. 
What Irenseus said, at a distance and long after, in 
theologic hate, may go for what it is worth. The 
fatal thing in Gnosticism was that it made of reli- 
gion a theory for the understanding, and not a life to 
the soid. Its creed, or " gnosis," consisted in specula- 
tions about the origin of existence, the origin of evil, 
and the method of salvation, — by turns ascetic and 
antinomian, like all mere speculative creeds. Con- 
sidered in themselves, these speculations may have 
been as good as men could invent then, — or now 
either, for that matter, — vain and fantastic as they 
appear to us. They were, in the main, a perfectly 
legitimate following out of a mode of thinking, which 
not only has the sanction of great names like Plato, 
but is at bottom the same from which the Logos-doc- 
trine itself was evolved. From the brightest ortho- 
doxy to the blackest heresy is but a step. 

In a matter vague and abstract like this, it is 
always best to see how the same problem shows itself 
to a modern mind. Eead, then, that chapter in 
" Ways of the Spirit," where an analysis is given of 
the methods by which men have attempted to find 
out God, — in other words, to trace the passage from 
Absolute Being to the manifold forms of actual Exist- 
ence ; and notice how helpless the mind is at every 
step, till it seems at length easiest to say, that there 
is no real existence at all except pure Intellect, of 
which matter or sensation is but a mood of experi- 
ence. Now, imagine a busy and speculative mind, 
3* 



58 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTUEY. 

utterly void of the certitudes of science, to busy it- 
self with that problem. I shall have to return to this 
point again, when w r e come to the realist and nomi- 
nalist discussions of the Schoolmen. So now I will 
say only this. That great impassable gulf from 
Infinite to Finite, which Plato made the sphere of 
divine Intelligence, in which lived those eternal Ideas 
that were the patterns of all material things, the 
Gnostics attempted to bridge by way of symbol and 
analysis, and to fill up with iEons, or " eternals," 
having such names as Thought, Man, Soul, "Wisdom, 
and so on, giving these bleak conceptions a certain 
fantastic life, and sequence by way of emanation or 
evolution* 

These phantom-existences, set by Valentin us in 
pairs, male and female, thirty in all, and made to 
succeed one another by some spectral process of gen- 
eration, are said to be derived from the Jewish 
Cabbala. Their names are the carrying out of a 
notion we find in Plato's Parmenides, that everything 
which exists in the realm of life, or fact, has its coun- 
terpart or prototype in the region of Ideas, — which 
are made to have, as it were, a shadowy life of their 
own. Thus, in the scheme of Valentinus : — ■ 

Depth (Father of All) and Silence (or Thought) begat 
Mind (unconscious Intelligence V) and Truth ; which begat 
Reason (Logos, conscious Intelligence) and Life ; which begat 
Man and Ecclesia (or Church) : i. e. the Ideal Society. f 

* Words of like but inverse meaning, as if each were the other's 
reflection in a mirror. Emanation begins with the highest form 
of being and works downward ; Evolution with the lowest, and 
works upward. 

t These eight JEons make the Valentinian Ogdoud. 



A PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION. 59 

In these it will be noticed that the former of each 
pair is a masculine name, and the latter a feminine ; 
so that it was impossible to speak of them except as 
" he " or " she." To us they are only names, like 
the categories of modern metaphysics ; but to the 
Greek mind their very grammatical gender suggested 
veritable forms of life, and logical analysis itself be- 
came a sort of transcendental theogony. 

We may put the problem of Gnosticism from 
another point of view, something as follows. The age 
of the world being generally assumed to be between 
five and six thousand years (more precisely, 5200), 
the question naturally occurs, What was there, then, 
before that time (or, as they would put it, before Time 
was) ? To this the only answer can be, The Infinite. 
But, again, is this an infinite Void (the Unknowable), 
or an infinite Fulness ? Infinite Fulness (likrjpwiJLa), 
replied the Gnostics ; and, to fill out the conception 
of it, devised their wild genealogies and cosmogonies. 
How, through the iEons Logos and Christ, these 
were connected with the Christian scheme, and how, 
through the Inferior Wisdom (Sophia Achamoth) with 
the realm of Matter and of Evil, it belongs to a more 
detailed exposition to set forth. 

In short, Gnosticism is a philosophy of evolution, 

— vague, premature, with no substance of verifiable 
fact or scientific method, and carried over from the 
realm of things to that of abstractions or mere visions 
and phantasms of things. Its favorite term " genesis " 

— or Birth by natural process as opposed to intelli- 
gent Creation — is attacked by the Apologists, ex- 
actly as its counterpart " evolution " is attacked to-day, 



60 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 

on the ground of incompatibility with moral freedom. 
To illustrate this phase of it, I translate here a Gnos- 
tic hymn of Valentinus, given by Hippolytus, which 
one might fancy taken straight from Shelley's Prome- 
theus or Goethe's Faust : * — 

" All things on Spirit borne I see ! 
Flesh from Soul depending, 

Soul from the Air forth-going, 
From iEther Air descending, 

Fruits from the Depth o'erflowing : 
So from the Womb springs Infancy." 

All these speculations seem to me neither better 
nor worse — though a good deal more poetic — than 
the efforts to solve the problem of existence which 
we find in more modern times. The fatal thing 
about them is that they were made the substance or 
the substitute of Eeligion. In calling them a phi- 
losophy of Evolution, we have said in advance how 
and where they failed. Schemes of evolution, taken 
by themselves, do not give us the specific fact of Sin. 
If not avowedly, at any rate by tendency and by im- 
plication, they deny the fact of moral freedom. In 
trying to account for Evil, they annihilate its nature 
as the conscience apprehends it, — the wilful viola- 
tion of divine law. 

Here was the incurable weakness of Gnosticism, 
its fatal flaw, What evil it recognized was in the na- 
ture of things, in Matter as opposed to Mind. That 
is, it was natural as opposed to moral evil ; to be 
known by Thought, not by Conscience. Of this Ave 

* The rhythmic form of the Greek may be found in Bunsen's 
" Christianity and Mankind," Vol. V. p. 96. 



THE GXOSTICS AND THE APOLOGISTS. 61 

shall see more when we come to Augustine's con- 
flict with that final form of Gnosticism known as 
Manichsean. At present, we have to do only with 
the single point of its moral impotence. Gnosticism 
was in its nature absolutely — nay, ridiculously — 
incapable of what I have before called " ethical pas- 
sion." To save society in those days, to re-create the 
world, to inaugurate a new era of humanity — the 
task which Christianity did in fact achieve — was 
not a speculative, it was a moral problem.* It de- 
manded courage, faith, self-sacrifice ; a willingness to 
go^ to the rack, the stake, the lions, rather than say a 
false word, or do an act capable of a disloyal inter- 
pretation. Such tests do not come to us in these 
days, and we are apt to forget that they were needed 
once. When Basilides said it was permitted to throw 
incense on a pagan chafing-dish, or mutter a prayer 
to Caesar with a mental reservation, the doom of 
Gnosticism was sealed. 

Now, side by side with the Gnostics in the field 
was another class of men and women whom we call 
Confessors, and their spokesmen we call Apologists. 
Those of them who died on the field are glorified in 
the church record as saints and martyrs. Their tragic 
and pathetic story is well told by Milman, and I shall 
not abridge it here. Such names as Ignatius and 
Polycarp, as Blanclina and Perpetua, ought to be 
sufficiently familiar. But it is very interesting to 
notice the style of thought that runs through the 

* It appears to me that in his very interesting exposition 
Maurice misses this point, which is more distinctly seen by 
Mansel. Maurice is a good deal of a gnostic himself, in the fervor 
of his speculative faith. 



62 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 

Christian writings of the latter half of the century. 
We trace in them two things : a strong ethical reac- 
tion against the speculative tendency just spoken of; 
and what Mr. Maurice * has well indicated as a dis- 
tinct effort to construct a religious system, able to 
hold its own before the powers of the world, — dis- 
tinct, that is, from the simple motive of seeking faith 
and salvation in the religion itself. The moral reac- 
tion it is fair enough to call the antithesis of Gnos- 
ticism, and the constructive tendency its counterpart. 

The most obvious symptom of the first is, of course, 
the defence of the Christian society on moral grounds : f 
the claim of purer lives, and the contrast with pagan 
vices ; the vehement denial of unclean and criminal 
acts charged against Christian assemblies ; the inces- 
sant denunciations of paganism on the ground of its 
corrupt mythology. 

Each head of the defence emphasizes some point 
of appeal to conscience, to the natural sense of right 
and wrong. The weak side of the old society — its 
easy indulgence to the flesh — is pitilessly exposed ; 
and a certain austere sanctity of domestic morals, a 
purity in the relation of man and wife, a tenderness 
in the relation of parent and child, quite alien from 
heathen custom, is especially dwelt on. The com- 
mon virtues of life, as we should reckon them in any 
orderly and decent condition of things, are pressed 
in a way that shows what bitter calumnies were in 

* " Ecclesiastical History of the First and Second Centuries." 
t It is worth noting, that none of the writers of this period (I 
think) except Irenasus claim miraculous powers for the Church, 
though some assert that demons were busy on behalf of the pa- 
gans. This does not, however, exclude wonders in some of the 
martyrologies. 



ITS EXCEEDING GRAVITY OF TEMPER. 63 

vogue, and with what serious pains the foundations 
were getting laid for those grave moralities which 
have been the real heart of Christian civilization 
since. It would be tedious to go into illustration 
of this ; but I think no one can read the Apology of 
Justin, the Apostolic Constitutions, the grave homi- 
lies of Clement, or even the loud tirades of Tertullian, 
without feeling that a new life was growing up, or- 
ganized, serious, strong, and wholesome ; a life which 
flowed broadly below political changes on one side, 
and theological controversies on the other ; a life 
which was getting knit and braced, by vigilant dis- 
cipline, against the time when it must abide the storm 
of imperial persecution, or undertake the enormous 
task of meeting the wild and brutal forces of the bar- 
barian world. Either crisis would have been fatal, 
unless there had been, at bottom, an absolute loyalty, 
most assiduously cherished, in the great war of Good 
and Evil. However imperfect its interpretation, or 
its theory, yet the life of the Christian society was 
staked on its unhesitating faith in a Power that makes 
for righteousness.* 

* It is hard to overstate the extreme seriousness, what some 
would call puritanism, of the writings referred to. A brief chap- 
ter on Smiling, by Clement of Alexandria (who allows it in mod- 
eration), is, I think, the only relief to the rigor of the attitude in 
which the Christians found themselves, in the battle of good and 
evil which was upon them. The same severe temper is shown in 
the bitter hostility of Tertullian (when a Montanist) against the 
novel doctrine of Hennas, of a possible repentance and pardon 
after baptism. (See Mossman's "Early Church," pp. 315-320.) 
The most serious controversy of the Church, early in the third 
century, was that sustained by Cyprian against the puritan ex- 
clusiveness of the Novatians. 



64 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 

It is important to recognize this feature first of all, 
because it is disguised in part by the crudeness of 
idea and the very simplicity of good faith with which 
these defences are put forth. It is hard, for instance, 
to conceive how Justin could have mistaken a large 
part of what he says for argument ; or how Marcus 
Aurelius could have kept the philosophic patience he 
was so famous for, through Justin's long, irrelevant 
harangue (as it must certainly have seemed to him) 
about the Hebrew prophecies. 

Again, in the face of the calm rationalism that for 
centuries had screened or allegorized the old Greek 
fables for all thinking men, the Apologists must needs, 
in weary iteration, one after the other, repeat the dull 
recital of the scandals of Olympus, — possibly, to some 
good popular effect, — without hinting at anything 
less offensive than the baldest literal understanding 
of them, exactly as some modern free-thinkers have 
treated the Old Testament. 

The frankness and vigor, too, with which the no- 
blest doctrines of natural theology are discarded, — 
such, as the immortality of the soul, which is thrust 
aside to make way for the dogma of a miraculous re- 
vival of the corpse, argued out in the oddest detail, 
and (naturally) with the grossest ignorance of the 
facts adduced in illustration, — serve to prejudice a 
modern mind unfairly against the main argument 
itself. I need hardly add the vituperative calumnies 
of such writers as Tatian, in his clamor against Greek 
philosophy, or the rhetoric of Tertullian, deepening 
to vindictive exultation, — which is, after all, mere 
rhetoric, — as he contemplates the pits of eternal 



RELATIONS WITH THE EMPIRE. 65 

flame, into which the enemies of the Church shall 
be cast. These things have left a stain- upon the 
memory of that age, quite plain enough in the view 
of the average historian ; and therefore it is right 
that they should be mentioned here, only to put in 
clearer relief the testimony to the real power and 
sincerity of the moral life they disfigure. 

The relations of the Christian community to the 
Eoman world at this period offer a very wide topic, 
of which I can touch only a single point or two. It 
is a familiar question, Why did the Eoman empire 
deal so much more harshly with the Christian re- 
ligion than with other local faiths, which it received 
on easy terms into its wide pantheon ? And it is a 
familiar answer, Because the Christian religion was 
in its nature uncompromising, and at bottom carried 
with it the destruction of Paganism itself, with the 
imperial system closely bound up with it. This an- 
swer, too, is illustrated by the refusal of the Chris- 
tians to pay the customary official homage to Csesar, 
which they held blasphemy, — refusal that in them 
was held constructive treason ; and, still further, by 
the fact that the Church was from the first a form 
of polity as well as a system of belief, aud held the 
germ of a new organization of society (iroXiTela), 
which was felt to be gradually crowding out the old. 
All this, it is said, must have been clear to the mind 
of a thoughtful pagan, like Aurelius ; and sufficiently 
accounts for the fact that he, the most scrupulously 
just of all the emperors of this period save one, and 
most gravely resolved to heal the evils of the state, 
was also sternest of all to put in force the laws against 
the Christians. e 



66 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 

To this statement, however, two things should be 
added : that the earlier persecutions seem all — as we 
see in the case of Polycarp — to have been a conces- 
sion to popular clamor and the temper of the mob ; 
and that this popular hate runs a great way back, long 
before the least public danger could have been thought 
of, from an obscure and petty sect. Thus in Paul's 
church at Eome were some of Nero's household ; Corn- 
modus was capriciously indulgent to the Christians ; 
the language of Trajan and Hadrian is at worst that 
of impatient contempt.* I have spoken elsewhere of 
the persecution under Nero, — a mere cowardly turn- 
ing of the popular rage against a class that lay too 
easily open to suspicion. Why was that ? and why 
were the mob so ready always with the most abom- 
inable charges against the Christians, — " (Edipodean 
marriages and Thyestean feasts," as Athenagoras re- 
ports ? 

It is, of course, impossible to go behind the reports 
to investigate the charges. There have been students 
of these things, who have believed that the worst of 
them were true, — that the sacred "mysteries" did 
include the tasting of blood and sensual excess.f 
Possibly, in instances. Cases of horror, frightful or 
disgusting, have not been unknown in religious orgies 
in modern times ; J and Christians even then were 

* The term Trajan addresses to Ignatius is KaKoSaifiov, which 
Mr. Maurice translates "poor devil." 

t The specific forms of these calumnies may be found in Ter- 
tullian's A&Nationes and Apologeticus. For illustration of the style 
of criticism referred to, see the very curious volume of Daumer. 

X Take that of the Convulsionnaires, for example, a century and 
a half ago, which sprang from a sect with such grave antecedents 
as the Jansenists. 



' CALUMNIES AGAINST THE CHRISTIANS. 67 

not slow to throw off the charge upon heretical assem- 
blies. Think of the raw material that entered into 
their composition, — in Syria and North Africa, for 
example ; and that they called, avowedly, " not right- 
eons, but sinners, to repentance." 

But consider, too, how likely the religious language 
of Christians was to invite, or at least give color to, 
those charges. If the Apocalypse, for example, or 
any of its imagery, was composed and current in the 
time of Nero, what more likely than that its vague 
threats of a sea of fire to engulf the guilty kingdoms 
of the earth should have been caught up and used to 
accuse the Christians of that vast conflagration in 
which half Eome perished ? What more likely — at 
a time when the most innocent word easily took a 
lewd signification * — than that the Christian language 
about a God of love, and of greetings with a holy kiss, 
should have been grossly but honestly misunderstood ? 
"What more likely than that the frank symbolism,, 
favorite and familiar to Christian lips, — " Except ye 
eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink his blood, 
ye have no life in you," — should have been quoted 
to j nstify the most horrid accusation of cannibal ban- 
quets at the table and the cup of sacrifice ? We know 
how easily such stories spread, and what frenzy of 
hate they will engender. 

It is likely, too, as implied in a hint of Suetonius, 
— nay, from what happened in the ferocious revolt 
under Hadrian it is certain, — that the popular mind 
made no distinction between Christian and Jew. It 
was not so much, says Tacitus, the charge of the burn- 

* Thus, in Iris own time, Erasmus says, it was not reckoned 
comely to use the verb amo. 



68 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 

ing, as of hatred against all mankind,* that embittered 
the persecution under Nero. And the fresh memory 
of the horrors in Cyprus and Palestine, more than fifty 
years later, which Justin alludes to as the background 
of his dialogue with the Jew Trypho, had its share in 
keeping up the frenzy of popular hate and fear which, 
more than any imperial policy, was the real ground of 
the terror that always menaced the Christian body : 
just as we may imagine the horrors of the Paris Com- 
mune, in 1871, not only to sharpen the vigilance of 
the German police against socialistic conspiracy now, 
but to goad the enemies of socialism with the haunt- 
ing, unforgiving hate that is born of fear. 

There is one other illustration of the Christian life 
of this period, of which a word must be said in con- 
clusion. I have spoken of the temper that runs 
through most of the "Apologists," as a moral reac- 
tion against the purely speculative views of Gnos- 
ticism. Of course, that reaction ran out into crudi- 
ties and excess. The hostility of Marcion against the 
Old Testament ; the sect of " Alogi," or " Wordless " 
Christians, who would hear nothing of any Logos at 
all ; the harsh asceticism of the " Encratites " or 
"wrestlers" against Satan, — are to be reckoned as 
so many "heresies," more or less allied with Gnos- 
ticism, yet of rather an ethical than speculative cast. 
The exaggerated, untempered, and eccentric moral 
phases exhibited by Tertullian, Neander explains by 
calling him an " anti-gnostic," — making this the ex- 
treme form the reaction took, and so accounting for 
what most offends in him. 

* Merivale's interpretation of odio humani generis. 



MONTANISM. 69 

As part of the same phenomenon, too, we must 
reckon the blazing out of the spiritualistic fervor of 
Montanism in the East,* which cut adrift, like Qua- 
kerism or Methodism, from the formalities and the 
sober traditions of the Christian body, and claimed 
to be a new dispensation, under the immediate guid- 
ance of the Holy Ghost, as promised in the last dis- 
course of Jesus, — a sort of Gnosticism reversed (as 
Baur explains it), finding in its dogma an account, 
not of the beginning, but the end of all things. 

That peculiar fanaticism has reappeared, in many 
forms, from age to age, — always, it is probable, as a 
protest against some exaggeration of formality and tra- 
dition ; and the heat of it has always been absorbed, 
to thaw out some gathering stiffness, or to warm some 
pale intellectuality. The extravagant pretensions of 
Montanism did no particular harm. But they occa- 
sioned some scandal, and even alarm, at a time when 
the Church was not used to dealing with such clis- 
ordered symptoms. Its language was blasphemous, 
perhaps, to the sober ear. It made more apparent 
the value and the need of the restraints it despised ; 
and so had its share, doubtless, in strengthening the 
hands of authority, to the confirming of creed and 
ritual. 

This, then, is the condition to which we are brought 
at the end of the second Christian century. One 
great phase of purely speculative development has 
been left behind. The growing life of Christendom 
has been asserted, again and again, to have its roots 

* Of which Mossman's " Early Christianity " gives a very ap- 
preciative account. 



70 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 

in morality, and for its law the law of personal holi- 
ness, — however technically, ascetically, or imperfectly 
understood. There is already a lengthening calendar 
of saints, martyrs, and heroes, making a sacred and 
powerful bond of union. There is a fast-growing 
consciousness that Christianity is to be shaped and 
developed into a community, understanding itself, 
organic, with its own authoritative belief and law. 
The pressure of imperial power and of popular sus- 
picion still holds it in check from spreading too 
vaguely, and melting away in fatal forms of com- 
promise. And, for the expression of that life, we 
have already the group of writers and teachers I 
have named, whose lives are closing with the cen- 
tury, — Irenseus, Clement, and Tertullian, to be im- 
mediately followed by the equal or greater names of 
Cyprian and of Origen. 



IV. 

THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 

TN" our study of early Christianity, it is easiest and 
•*• most common to think of Paganism simply as 
its antagonist, or opposite ; and to regard the process 
going on as one purely of conquest or conversion. 
It is so in the main. There was a new spirit at war 
with the old institutions, and beliefs. The eye catches 
first and most readily the dramatic contrast, watches 
with keenest interest the fortunes of the battle. The 
radical difference is what we have seen something of 
already, in the Christian thought of the second cen- 
tury, and shall see more of in the sharper collisions 
yet to come. 

But this is not the only view. It is not even, 
strictly speaking, the truest view. Leaven works in 
the lump, not by destruction, but by co-operation. 
Christianity was at work "like leaven," — like a new 
element of great power suddenly set free, not to the 
extinction or exclusion of those that were there be- 
fore, but to the making of new compounds, in which 
all their former potency abides under other names. 
Nitrogen and hydrogen are not nearly so unlike in 
their own apparent properties, as in the combinations 
they make with the oxygen that attacks them both. 
To understand the Christian movement justly, how- 



72 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 

ever imperfectly, we must know something of the 
material it wrought upon. And of this, not merely 
its falsehood, unbelief, or moral decay ; but the posi- 
tive side as well, — the serious thought, the vigorous 
life, the genuine piety, that still had their place in 
the mind of Paganism. 

For it is to be seen, not only that the old Pagan 
faiths had not died out at the coming of Christianity, 
as we are apt to think ; but that what was best and 
truest in them had taken a new start, as it were, and 
a genuine pagan revival was to some extent keeping 
pace with the stronger religious growth that at length 
absorbed, or else suppressed it. For a time, however, 
not only the two movements are not antagonistic to 
each other ; they are, in a sense, independent efforts 
after a similar ideal. The rapid and powerful process 
of organization in Christianity itself would not have 
been possible, unless a part of its work had been al- 
ready done by its antagonist. The Providence itself 
that wrought in it would not have been so clear, 
without that spiritual and moral preparation which 
was going on in the pagan world. 

It has been common enough to recognize two forms 
of this preparation. One is in the way of religious 
craving after some good yet unattained. "We know," 
says Paul, "that the whole creation groaneth and 
travaileth in pain together until now, waiting to be 
delivered." Of this I shall say a word presently. 
The other is in the way of philosophic speculation, 
which failed to interpret these longings for a higher 
life, but did much to shape the mould in which the 
victorious dogma was long after cast. Besides these 



CICERO. 73 

is a third phase, which makes the object of our study 
now. 

Attention has been called * to the great contrast in 
temper and spirit between the time of the fall of the 
Eoman Eepublic and that of the culmination of the 
Empire two centuries later, between the time of Cicero 
and that of Marcus Aurelius. In the earlier time we 
have complete scepticism and negation. The foun- 
tain of old belief seems to have quite run dry. As 
to the forms of pagan ritual, once so venerable, Cicero 
does not see how its diviners can look one another 
soberly in the face. In his writings — by far the 
broadest and completest reflection we have of the 
mind of any ancient period — we find three phases, 
or moods, so utterly distinct as to seem out of keep- 
ing with any one era, not to say any one honest 
mind. In his Speeches, he is the eloquent conserva- 
tive, appealing profusely for popular effect to the im- 
mortal gods, whose providence is too plain for cavil in 
any crisis of the state, whose judgments are sure and 
terrible to all who defy their law. In his Dialogues, 
the very existence of these gods is an open question, 
calmly debated in friendly philosophical discourse ; 
while the ideal life of pious contemplation, the confi- 
dent hope of immortal peace and communion of con- 
scious spirits beyond the grave, appear to make the 
sure foundation and deep background of his thought. 
In his Letters, both these phases disappear : the 
friendly courtesy, the party passion, the personal mor- 
tification or resentment, love or hate, are purely on a 

* Boissier, La Religion Romaine, from which several of the fol- 
lowing illustrations are taken. 

4 



74 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 

secular level ; even the confidences of intimate friend- 
ship, or the sharpest sorrows of private life, give no 
one hint of anything so distant and unreal as a reli- 
gious interpretation to its riddle, or a ray of that com- 
fort of which he is so eloquent when he robes himself 
as a philosopher. For any personal conviction, any 
guidance of conduct, any stay of character, religion 
— if it means anything more than Eoman justice or 
Eoman pride — is an absolute blank. And, beside 
the best of his contemporaries, Cicero is a man of even 
exemplary piety. 

Now immediately after the age of Cicero, in the 
first years of the new Empire, there are symptoms of 
a profound change. Not only the head of the state 
professes himself the patron of piety and morals, and 
chooses a religious title, "Augustus," by which he is 
to be most familiarly known to the minds of men : 
speaking the most serious thought of his time, Yirgil 
dwells on the golden age which a divine providence 
is just opening to mankind, in images and phrases 
which many have thought borrowed directly from He- 
brew prophets ; so that his name and verse became 
the charm that won for the mind of Paganism a place 
in the widening domain of Christian culture. And as 
the Empire, in spite of calamity and crime, grew more 
broad, magnificent, and strong, the same feeling deep- 
ened into a religion of the Empire, all the more formi- 
dable to the Christian faith because it was genuine 
and sincere ; not merely, as we are too apt to think, 
because it was cruel, degenerate, and corrupt. 

This New Paganism, as we may call it, went along 
with an increasing moral earnestness and religious 



THE STOICS. 75 

fervor. The moral feeling might be capricious, blind, 
and intolerant ; the religious fervor might run into 
the wildest superstition. There was never a faith 
yet that was not disgraced by its most zealous ad- 
herents. But the contrast is hardly greater between 
the implacable passions of the civil war and Virgil's 
pious hopes of peace, than that between the blank 
incredulity of Julius Caesar and his age and the se- 
rene kindliness of Antoninus Pius, or the religious 
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, — the noblest of 
Stoics on the most august of thrones. 

The Stoic doctrine was the intellectual interpreta- 
tion of the new pagan faith. In its speculations on 
the origin of things, still more in its ethical ideal, it 
is curiously near to some of the noblest phases of 
Christian theology and morals. It is not likely, 
though many argue still, that Seneca learned that 
doctrine from the Apostle Paul ; but no one can 
read the writings of both without feeling how much 
is of a common spirit, if not from a common source. 
And what in Seneca is mere ethical glow has within 
a century become, in Antoninus and Aurelius, the 
fervor of a genuine religious life. The "reign of 
the Stoics," represented by such names as these, does 
infinitely more honor to the faith that inspired it 
than anything we find in the first half-century, at 
least, of the Christian Emperors. We may even have 
to come down as far as St. Louis of France to find 
their parallel. 

How far, on the other hand, may the Christian 
theology and morals have been indebted to the doc- 
trine of the Stoics ? A few words will serve to show 



76 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 

their points of likeness, and their fundamental dif- 
ference.* 

The Stoic cosmogony shows itself as a compromise 
between the conception of a pre-existent personal Cre- 
ator, outside the universe which he brings into being, 
— the idea of earlier philosophers and of the world 
at large, — and the notion of Matter blindly guided by 
Force, the doctrine of Democritus and Epicurus. To 
the Stoic the universe was not made by God ; it ivas 
God, and endowed with all the attributes necessary 
to his conception of a Divinity, including power, in- 
telligence, wisdom, and justice. This Divinity had 
from eternity a fixed and unchanging purpose, which 
was the Pronoia, or Providentia, — the everlasting 
Reason appearing in the succession of events. Such 
a Divinity differs from the Christian ideal chiefly 
in the absence of personal love and care for his off- 
spring ; and even as to this, the Pronoia is almost an 
affectionate interest in Man, — not men. The fact 
that this Being is identified with the universe is of 
no account. It would be more true to say, that the 
universe is identified with the Divinity. The world 
is seen as the successive emanations and withdrawals 
of the Divine Reason, the eternal Logos. It is the 
systole and diastole of the Divine nature, alternately 
developing, through the series of the four elements, 
from fire — conceived as the primitive and natural 
form of intelligent matter — into the other three, in 
the order of their density, and back again to the form 
of fire. Thus the fundamental conception is not cre- 
ation, but evolution or emanation. 

* Compare " Hebrew Men and Times," pp. 852-357. For some of 
the following illustrations I am indebted to Prof. J. B. Greenough. 



THE STOIC ETHICS. 77 

Of this animate universe, with its periodicity of 
creation (if we may call it so) and extinction, every- 
thing, even the soul of the Stoic sage, forms a part. 
Virtue is the perfect adjustment of all the desires 
and acts of the soul — in Christian phraseology, the 
submission of the will — to the universal and per- 
sistent Logos, the divine reason and providence. Vir- 
tue is thus, necessarily, one and indivisible. This 
ethical view is essentially the same with that of the 
more rigid Christian sects. " Whosoever shall offend 
in one point, he is guilty of all." All wrong-doing 
and all right-doing must be alike in value. On this 
side the razor's edge, it is all good ; on that side, all 
evil. Growth in goodness, properly speaking, there 
can be none. 

All the Stoic paradoxes are the logical following 
out of this view. A man either is, or he is not, in 
harmony with the divine order of the universe. If 
he is, he is " the wise man " (sapiens) ; if not, he is 
" the fool " (stultus). These two are all. A man can- 
not be approaching wisdom. He is no nearer to it 
with a thousand excellences (virtutes) than with one, 
— like the string of a piano, which makes a discord 
till it is perfectly in tune. The " wise man " is the 
perfect human being ; * that is, perfectly adjusted to 
the rest of the universe of which he forms a part. 
The one problem of life is to make the Divine Eeason 
paramount and supreme in the sphere of one's own 
conduct. "He has a truly great mind," say the 
Stoics, " who surrenders himself wholly to God." His 

* "Operis sic optimus omnis est opifex, solus sic rex, solus 
formosus." 



78 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 

assurance of the right is his only and sufficient re- 
ward. To him can be no evil, and no pain: all is, 
reconciled in the universal Order. He alone is free, 
or rich, or of a sound mind ; he, in truth, is the only 
sovereign. 

Of this serious and enlightened pagan gospel a sin- 
gle point may be remarked. To say nothing of the 
wealth of doctrine gathered about the Messianic idea 
and the person of Jesus, Stoicism lacked the one thing 
which made the Christian gospel a power in the 
religious life of mankind. This was what we may 
call Paul's method of salvation, of which the cardinal 
points are conviction of sin and salvation by faith. 
This method is as true, psychologically, as it was then 
and is now essential to any genuine vigor of religious 
life in the soul. If we allow ourselves to think of 
Christianity as the development of a system of doc- 
trine, we shall exactly miss its secret, — the one thing 
that makes its triumph intelligible or its history 
worth our study. Christianity as a scheme of doc- 
trine may be doubtfully balanced against one or two 
pagan schemes, Stoic or Neo-Platonic, from both of 
which it borrowed very largely. But, as a method of 
the divine life, it had a power from another source, for 
lack of which Stoicism miserably failed. 

We have before us, then, two features of the later 
Paganism, which we may call the religion of the peo- 
ple and the religion of the philosophers. To these we 
may add a third influence, working powerfully in the 
same general direction, and shown in the reform of 
the Eoman Law. The period we are considering is 
called by Gibbon " the learned and splendid era of 



TESTIMONY OF TEKTULLIAN. 79 

jurisprudence." It culminated, a little later, in the 
great jurists of the third century ; but the expanding, 
softening, humanizing process, carried out in the suc- 
cessive Christian codes, was distinctly the fruit of 
the early imperial age. The crude, stiff formalism of 
the older code,* with its effete system of domestic 
tyranny,! was shaped and tempered by larger max- 
ims of equity, and by the humaner spirit that grew 
up as national boundaries melted into the large sys- 
tem of the Eoman world. 

These three — piety among the people, Stoicism 
with the philosophers, law reform among the jurists — 
we must set over against the decay of faith, the moral 
corruption, and the political languor which are the 
symptoms most commonly taken note of in the pagan 
empire. They are not the whole of the picture. They 
are not, by any means, its more salient points. But, 
hidden as they often are in the background, they serve 
not only for relief to darker impressions; they are 
quite necessary to be taken into account, to explain 
the remarkable phenomenon of the extension of Chris- 
tianity at the end of the second century. " We are a 
people of yesterday," says Tertullian, in his tempest- 
uous challenge to the pagan world ; " yet we have 
filled every place among you, — cities, islands, forts, 
towns, assemblies ; your very camps, your tribes, com- 
panies, palace, senate, forum. We leave you nothing 
but your temples." 

These words, we must remember, were written hot 

* See illustrations in Gibbon, and in Maine's " Ancient Law." 
t The patria potesfas. See Troplong, De I'Influence du Chris- 
tianlsme svr le Droit Civile des Romains, p. 62. 



80 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 

from witnessing the martyrdoms of Carthage, not long 
before the persecutions of Decius, which made the 
signal of a war of extermination against the Christian 
Church. To a cooler eye, that war must have seemed 
likely to succeed. The persecution of Christianity by 
the Eoman emperors, it is true, was capricious and 
occasional ; and it occurred at long enough intervals 
— averaging some twenty years — to allow amply for 
the peaceable spread of the new religion. Christianity 
not as a moral force, or even as a system of dogma, 
but only as a quasi-political structure dangerous to 
the state, was the thing attacked. Moreover — to 
judge from the edicts of Diocletian — quiet suppres- 
sion was the thing aimed at : the atrocious cruelties 
recorded by Eusebius were wilful acts of local gover- 
nors, and the very execution of the edicts might be 
systematically evaded (as by Constantius Chlorus) 
without any rebuke from the central power. We 
find nothing in these centuries to compare with the 
virulence and ferocity with which the Eeformers in 
Trance and the Netherlands were hunted down ; still 
less, to compare with the diabolical craft and efficiency 
of the Spanish Inquisition. Pagan Eome showed 
never such wary and patient cruelty as Papal Eome. 
There was, however, one moment when its whole 
weight bore on the rising faith to crush it. If Chris- 
tianity triumphed in the end, it was by virtue of a 
very wide sympathy and a very extensive preparation 
in the mind of Paganism. And the moral ground 
on which this rested was the same that had already 
put forth that independent growth of conscience and 
piety, just spoken of as the latest and best fruit of 
the ancient creed. 



THE OLD ITALIAN WOESHIP. 81 

If we look more carefully at the case before us, we 
see that this later Paganism, the popular religion of 
the Empire, grew up along with the great political 
change which suddenly turned a grinding municipal 
tyranny into a broad imperial system embracing 
many states. Christian writers have always pointed 
to that system as the manifest opening of the way by 
Divine Providence to the march of the true religion. 
We shall see, for example, how distinctly this thought 
lies in the appeals to faith of Leo the Great. 

It is just as true of the religious and moral con- 
ditions as it is of the political conditions. The old 
nature worship, formulated in the popular Italian 
creed, and embodied in the state religion of republican 
Eome, was as formal and rigid as the aristocratic code 
of the old law ; inconceivably precise, minute, timid, 
and often cruel. Ovid* relates the curious myth — 
a grotesque parallel to the intended sacrifice of Isaac 
and the substitution of a ram — in which the good 
Numa palters with his deity, and evades the shocking 
demand of human sacrifice, outwitting the divinity 
in a play of words. " I demand," says Jupiter, " the 
head " — "of a leek," says the pious king ; " of a 
live " — " fish," interposes ISTuma ; " man," insists the 
god ; " one hair I give you." Jupiter laughs, and 
Numa's point is gained. 

Livy has many a story of the same grim half- 
humorous formalism. Thus, to foil a prophecy that 
the Gauls should occupy the soil of Eome, two cap- 
tive Gauls, a man and a woman, are buried alive 
within the city limits. Some soldiers in revolt think 

* Fasti, iii. 339-344. 
. 4* p 



82 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 

to free their conscience from their military oath 
by killing the consuls, to whom they have sworn 
it. Papirius, on the eve of battle, is deceived by a 
false official report of a favorable omen : the sacred 
chickens have eaten heartily. Being told, later, that 
the report was false, " The peril," said he, " is with 
the officer who sent it ; him the gods will doubtless 
punish justly ; as for myself, I am bound by the re- 
port sent me in due form." Accordingly, he is victo- 
rious in the battle, while the lying officer is killed. 

Political sagacity or military sense, again,, kept the 
old formalism in check, so that it was rarely suffered 
to stand in the way of policy. Its verbal juggles were 
oftener used to patch up some atrocious state-craft or 
treachery, like that by which the Eoman armies 
escaped from the Caudine Forks, where the general 
held as hostage, assuming to be a Samnite citizen, 
insults the Eoman envoy, and so brings on a new 
cause of war ; or else gave way to a rude rationalism, 
as when a commander of the fleet orders the sacred 
chickens that will not eat to be pitched overboard, 
where at any rate they must drink. But the senti- 
ment of it lay very deep in the popular heart. It is 
a remarkable illustration of Bom an feeling that, on 
the day of his triumph, Julius Caesar, the Epicurean 
rationalist and the merciless destroyer, mounted on 
his knees the long flight of stairs that led up to the 
Capitol, that by this act of ostentatious humility he 
might avert those divine judgments supposed to be 
provoked by inordinate felicity. 

It is not easy to see just how the Italians regarded 
their popular divinities. Their worship (if we may 



GODS OF THE NURSERY. 83 

call it so) seems often frank fetichism of the rudest 
sort. Their very names, as Augustine recounts them * 
seem as consciously make-believe as those in a fairy 
story. Thus, as we should say, the babe is brought 
to birth by the good fairy Light (L-ucina) ; a second 
(Levana) receives it in her arms ; ministering sprites 
(Cuba, Rumina, Cunina) take charge of the offices of 
sleeping, nursing, and laying the infant in the cradle ; 
in due course he is given in charge of the attendant 
fairies Walky, Talky, Eaty, Drinky, Outgo, Home- 
come, and so on to others, whose names are about 
equally ingenious and recondite, clown to the sad 
genius Waily {Nmnia), lamenting at the burial, f 

In all this, which the excellent Christian saint 
stigmatizes as idolatry and superstition, — to say 
nothing of deities that to him are simply unclean 
devils, — we should probably see nothing more than 
the same childish, half-reverent fancy, which crowds 
the infant lore of our day with similar innocent im- 
personations. Human life is beset, and the natural 
world is crowded, with very real powers, utterly 
mysterious to us ; and what we call the old nature- 
religions include, along with many a dismal super- 
stition, some tender, trustful, grateful recognition of 
a living Force, to which mere natural science is apt 
to blind us. What made these simple fancies hateful 
and abhorrent to the Christian mind was that they 
were part of the habit and the system wrought up 

* Be Civitate Dei, vi. 9. 

t Among these names are Educa, Potina, Cuba, Abeona, Adeona, 
Iterduca, Domiduca, and many others, for which see Keller, x. 3 
(Dietz's Paris ed.). 



84 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 

into the tremendous despotism of Eome. The pagan- 
ism which included them had also its horrible and 
revolting side, full of violence, cruelty, and corrup- 
tion ; and so they had to take their flight, along with 
the nymphs of mountain, wood, and wave, before the 
wrath and hate of an austerer faith. 

The great gods of Italian t worship were no doubt 
simply the powers of nature personified. Saturn is 
the seed-time, Jupiter the sky, Juno the air, Janus 
(Dianus) the sun-god, with his feminine partner Di- 
ana, the moon ; Mars is the mighty, Venus is spring- 
tide (later, beauty or love), and so on. Our asso- 
ciations with these names come mostly from the 
Greek fables, which Latin poets and mythologists 
imported ready made. To the popular mind, most 
likely, they were abstractions nearly as vague and 
dim as our Electricity, Gravitation, and the like, — 
except that they were objects of more real awe, and 
were regarded with the same curious formalism we 
have noted before. As has been said, they were di- 
vine Functions (jiumina), rather than divine Persons. 
As soon as the functions are dimly seen, or absorbed 
by a growing positivism, the divinity becomes a scare- 
crow or laughing-stock : thus we see how Plautus 
makes fun of the mythological sanctities. 

This list is filled out with names that to us are ab- 
solutely no more than abstract qualities, — Honor, 
Manhood, Terror, Fortune, Public Safety, — which 
seem quite as real as the rest. But the deity, the 
function, or the quality, is strictly localized. Each 
town has its own divinity, potent there, void and im- 
potent elsewhere. For instance, a vow having been 



ROMAN FORMALISM. 85 

made to " Knights' Fortune," it must be paid in 
another city, because no such divinity is known in 
Eome. If a town is to be attacked, its gods are en- 
treated, with a profusion of compliment and promise, 
to forsake that place and take their abode in Eome : 
a long formula is preserved,* which contains the right 
phrases and etiquette of this " evocation." This com- 
pliment performed, the Eoman conscience is free ; the 
holy places are " made profane " ; the attack, which 
would have been sacrilege before, becomes a pious 
act ; if the deity refuses, the peril is his own.f Thus 
Juno is solemnly evoked from Veii, and for the first 
time becomes a great goddess of the Eomans. And 
from its first tutelar divinity, Mars, the victorious 
state incorporates in its worship, one by one, the 
deities of all conquered towns and nations, till its 
pantheon includes all the gods and all the worships 
of the pagan world. 

Such a mythology as this is far enough from the 
vivid and riotous fancy of the Greek. It is, in es- 
sence, bald, hard, bleak, domineering. It lay in the 
region of ritual and form. Its rites must be per- 
formed strictly in accordance with rule and tradi- 
tion ; and the way of performing them duly was the 
secret tradition of a sacred order. Originally, the 
father of the family was priest as well as autocrat in 

* In Macrobius, Saturn., iii. 9. 

t Hence the importance of using the exact title which a divinity 
will acknowledge. There is a charm in " Open Sesame " in the 
tale which cannot be shared by any other grain. The true name 
of Rome, and that of its tutelar divinity, are said to have been 
kept as a mystery, lest they should become known to an enemy, 
who might thus disarm the city of its defence. 



86 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 

his own household, and the ritual was closely bound 
up with family dignities and aristocratic tradition. 

Such formal devotion has little in it of what we 
call religion : nothing of pious contemplation, little 
if any fervor of devout emotion. Indeed, warmth of 
religious sentiment, the emotional side of piety, it 
distinctly repudiates and dreads ; as we may imagine 
a stiff ritualist of the last century to abhor the early 
fervors of Methodism. Such passions only interfere 
with its fixed and rigid temper. They are merely 
a detestable, most likely an outlandish superstition, 
alien and hateful to the mind of a true-born Eoman. 

And, again, it became the centre of a very wide and 
powerful organization of religious motives and ideas. 
Kome won to itself, in ages of conquest, a monopoly 
of religions, as well as a monopoly of political powers 
and rights. The central, the real object of Eoman 
worship we may hold to have been Eome herself, — 
as England was said to be the only religion of Lord 
Palmerston. We may well believe it. The ancient 
city was closely identified with the altar, the hearth - 
fire, the sacred Name, which marked its peculiar wor- 
ship.* Nothing less than that vast impersonal but 
very real abstraction, the City itself, could be the 
object of that vivid, intense, self-devoted, and narrow 
loyalty which goes by the name of patriotism, and 
made the civic virtue of the ancient State. Eome 
was the object of a passionate devotion, a grateful 
piety, a religious pride and veneration, which made 
the most powerful and perhaps the holiest emotion a 
Eoman could know. 

* See Coulanges, La Cit€ Antique. 



ROMAN TYRANNY. 87 

But Eome — the " mother of his soul," the great 
loved, revered, awful State, that put her sword iu 
his hand to strike, and set up her eagle as a symbol 
for his military adoration and faith, and covered him 
with her shield though he were the humblest citizen 
in the remotest corner of the earth ; Eome, at whose 
name the magistrate at Philippi trembles when Paul 
appeals to her protection — was a haughty, tyrannical, 
unjust sovereign to those stifled nationalities that 
made up her imperial domain. Nothing in all the 
history of despotism is more hateful than the dealings 
of Eome with her conquered provinces ; no aristocracy 
was ever more insolent, domineering, and profligate, 
than the oligarchy of officials and ex- officials that 
made the Eoman Senate in the latter days of the 
Eepublic* To believe Cicero's eloquent and gener- 
ous harangues, — himself proud of his place in that 
famous oligarchy, — the feelings of the provincials 
towards Eome could hardly have been anything but 
a helpless despair and hate. That divinity, to which 
so many millions of human victims had been sacri- 
ficed, could hardly ha\ r e been, in their eyes, anything 
else than an omnipotent, omnipresent, and inexorable 
Demon. Ireland in her bloody memories of Crom- 
well, Poland in her struggles following the Partition, 
Greece under the brute despotism of Turkey, may 
help us understand the condition of Syria, Macedonia, 
Sicily, Gaul, or Spain, as provinces of the imperial 
Eepublic. The word empire (imperncm) in that day 
meant simply military rule. By political tradition, 
these provinces were held by the law of conquest. 

* See Froude's " Julius Caesar." 



SO THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 

The municipal law that for centuries had grown up 
as a system for a single city made the one type and 
rule for a government as wide, almost, as the civilized 
world. It was administered purely in the interest 
and in the name of that one city ; and its executive 
officers (pro-consul, pro-prcetor) were simply her mili- 
tary commanders or civil magistrates, who had served 
their term at home. 

The evil and iniquity of this system had been seen 
a hundred years before the Empire had been estab- 
lished in its place, — if by no others, by the great 
tribunes Tiberius and Caius Gracchus, who both died 
victims of the Eoman aristocracy. A hundred years 
of civil war had exterminated the old parties of the 
Eepublic. The genius of Julius Csesar and the cau- 
tious policy of Augustus had created a new system, in 
which all rulers, magistrates, and commanders were 
made subject to the one Chief of the Eoman world. 
It is not necessary to speak of the new evils which 
now came in place of the old evils. In one word, 
political freedom was extinct. But that freedom was 
the very thing men hated and- feared. For many 
generations that freedom had meant violence at 
home, and flagrant oppression in the provinces. 
Whatever else the revolution in the state accom- 
plished, it at least set the subject states free from the 
irresponsible class despotism they had been suffering 
under so long. It was a revolution that brought them 
comparative prosperity and repose. 

The phrase " peace of the Empire " * is the name 
of what they felt to be an unspeakable relief and gain. 

* The pax Bomana. 



THE EMPEBOR A GOD. 89 

Their sovereign was no longer the hard, cruel, grasp- 
ing, abstract impersonation of the City, with her far- 
reaching hundred hands, like those of a Hindoo idol. 
It was at least a Man, who could make his will 
prevail over the petty persecution of innumerable 
despots. As Paul appealed from Festus, so men 
throughout the Empire could appeal from their local 
tyrants, to Caesar. Whatever his personal vices or 
crimes, at least he represented the unity of a sover- 
eign state. To him all subjects, all states, were equal. 
It was no great flight of imagination to make him in 
men's eyes the type of a universal, impartial Provi- 
dence, — "image of all," say the Christian Clementines. 

In men's eyes he was more : he was, very literally 
and simply, a god in human form. As a god, Virgil 
says, sacrifice shall be offered monthly on his altar. 
And Yelleius Paterculus, who went with Tiberius 
into Germany, tells in vivacious narrative how a bar- 
barian drove his canoe across the stream, pressed 
through the crowds that surrounded the imperial 
command, gazed long and earnestly at him, and went 
away saying, " To-day I have seen the gods." * 

We do not enter readily into the state of mind 
that made it easy and natural in that day to look on 
a man as a real divinity ; that literally deified him 

* So when Pope Alexander III., in flight from Barbarossa, 
landed at Montpellier, a Saracen in the crowd pressed close to his 
stirrup, so as to have a fair view of the Christians' god. The feel- 
ing of the barbarian in Velleius is exactly reflected in that of the 
Southern negroes during the civil war. " What you know 'bout 
Massa Linkum 1 " said one of them to an army officer, who was 
criticising some act of the government. " Him like de Lord ; him 
eberywhar." 



90 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 

because he was, as we should say, the incarnation of 
an idea. Though to us, too, the worship of Paul as 
Mercury, and of Barnabas as Jupiter, at Lystra, ought 
to make it, if not clear, at least credible. To us it is 
a very crude mythology ; yet it certainly was one of 
the forces that made it possible to reconcile men's 
minds to a creed whose corner-stone was the Incarna- 
tion of a Deity. The notion of a "man-god" — that 
is, of a Divine Person in human form — was already 
familiar to the pagan mind. The Emperor was 
spoken of in language that reflects, or prefigures, with 
strict exactness, that applied in the later creeds to 
the human life of Christ. This belief in the visible 
presence of divinity upon earth springs no doubt from 
sources very different in the Christian and in the 
Pagan mind ; but they ran closely parallel, and merged 
in the faith that included both. The philosophical 
elements that entered into the faith belong to the his- 
tory of religious speculation, and we shall have more 
to say of them further on. Just now it is enough to 
say, that — however crude or impossible it may look 
to us — there never was a faith in a deity actually 
walking the earth and conversant among men more 
positively, sincerely, or in its way devoutly held, than 
this deification of the Eoman Emperor among the peo- 
ple of the provinces.* 

* The worship of the Emperor was forbidden in Rome, toler- 
ated in Italy, universal in the provinces. Sixty districts or towns of 
Gaul, each with its separate shrine, joined in a common ritual in 
his service at a metropolitan temple close to the wall of Lyons 
(see below). The assemblies here made a sort of provincial par- 
liament, and sent regular reports to Rome ; having, however, no 
power of independent legislation 



WORSHIP OF THE EMPEROR. 91 

For it was not court flattery, — the impious adula- 
tion which craves " the thrift that follows fawning." 
It was the expression of gratitude for a blessing too 
great to have come from a merely human source, for de- 
liverance from evils too great to be stayed by a human 
hand. The wreck of old political institutions had 
destroyed or set afloat those old local faiths that be- 
longed to them ; and this rude but vigorous growth of 
a popular religion had come to take their place, and 
throve on their decay. 

Very significantly, too, there is scarce a hint of it in 
the more familiar literary sources of our history. Its 
record is in scattered monuments and inscriptions, 
only brought to light and deciphered within the last 
few years ; just as our earliest contemporary records of 
the popular Christian faith are in the monuments and 
inscriptions of the Catacombs. From such sources we 
learn that there was not only the vague popular ado- 
ration, such as Tacitus speaks of when he ascribes 
the working of miracles to the Emperor Vespasian. 
There was also an organized worship of the Emperor, 
with temple and ritual, and a consecrated order of 
priests.* Every year embassies went up from the 
provinces to Borne to carry him their thanksgivings or 
vows or expressions of religious homage. To be a 
member of that priesthood, or head of such an em- 
bassy, was a dignity held in reserve for men who had 
discharged the highest official trusts in their native 
district, a dignity to be recorded in inscriptions on 
their funeral monuments. 

* The official title of this priesthood was Flamen Romce Divorum 
et Augusti. 



92 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 

The religious vows were not merely the formal or 
official language of diplomatic speech ; but plain men, 
of humble life, of no official station or ambition, re- 
corded their private reverence and homage, or that of 
their households, — just as a pious Catholic might re- 
cord his self-consecration to a patron saint, — in words 
of pious gratitude for the blessings devoutly ascribed 
to Caesar as author and giver of daily benefits.* While 
each nation had its especial deity, he only, men said, 
was one god over all the earth. 

To us, who know that succession of Caesars main- 
ly from the court scandal of Suetonius or the lurid 
tragedy of the Annals of Tacitus, there is something 
strange, and even pathetic, in this ascription of divine 
honors to such names as Tiberius, Nero, or Domitian. 
The habits of old faith, the terrible memories of con- 
quest, the immense relief of comparative equity, secu- 
rity, and quiet, are all necessary to be kept in mind, 
to make it credible.! 

In one way this imperial creed brought the Pagan 
mind into most sharp and direct collision with the 
Christian faith. The religion of the State became 
more and more identified with the worship paid per- 
sonally to the Emperor ; and any symbolic act of that 

* See examples of these inscriptions in Coulanges, Institutions 
Politiques de Vancienne France. 

t That the Roman State — still a Republic in name — should 
have endured for fourteen years what it is charity to call the insane 
freaks and caprices of one sickly and weak-minded youth, Nero, 
is partly explained by the remorseless cruelty of the Roman temper 
and manners, but chiefly by the name of Caesar, which he inher- 
ited, and by the deep horror left on men's minds from the century 
of the Civil War. 



MARCUS AURELIUS. 93 

worship — swearing to the name of Caesar, or casting 
incense in the formal ritual — became in a special 
way the test of political loyalty. To refuse it, under 
whatever pretext, was constructive treason. It was 
this, and not any hatred of the Christian system, or 
inclination to persecute it as such, that so often put 
the Christians under the ban of the State. Most of 
the Emperors, it is quite clear, would have been glad 
to evade any such attack on a class of safe, obedient, 
trusty subjects, which the Christians generally were ; 
so the early persecutions were spasmodic, of short 
duration, and far apart. Even Trajan, who will not 
have the Christians hunted out or betrayed by in- 
formers, must submit them to the test of " worship- 
ping my divinity." * In short, the more sincere and 
the more fully developed this new state religion, the 
more inexorably it must needs deal with any rival 
creed. 

It is to be noticed, also, that the antagonism spoken 
of comes to a head about the middle of the second 
century ; and that from that time forth it is open war, 
with little truce, until the stronger faith prevails. At 
first sight it is strange that this war should have been 
declared by the wisest and most scrupulously just of 
all the Emperors, — by Marcus Aurelius, who is ad- 
dressed by Justin as if he was almost persuaded to be 
a Christian, and whose ethics are as clear and austere 
as those of Paul. But it was because Aurelius had 

* So I understand the phrase supplicando diis nostris, comparing 
it with imagini tuce supplicarent in the letter of Pliny. The spe- 
cific act of sacrifice is the one thing demanded in the edicts of 
Diocletian. 



94 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 

religiously consecrated himself to the service of the 
State, because he scrupulously endeavored to make 
himself worthy of the worship which the state religion 
enjoined, that he saw the more clearly how inevitable 
and uncompromising the conflict had come to be. 

It was in his time that the worship of the Emperor 
came to its highest reach of sincerity and fervor. 
The personal virtues of the " five good Emperors," of 
whom he was the last, contrasted with the vices of 
most that went before, had carried the grateful hom- 
age rendered to Csesar to a certain loyal and devout 
enthusiasm. As a picture of Napoleon might be found 
sixty years ago in every French peasant's cottage, as an 
image of the Virgin adorns the home of every hum- 
blest Catholic devotee, so the fio;ure or bust of the 
good Emperor was to be found at the family altar of 
every pious Eoman subject ; and the inscriptions of 
veneration and homage become more fervent now 
than ever* The popular religion of the Empire had 
now reached its completest development. And, if 
there had been an abiding principle of life in it, 
Christianity might have found a worthier rival, and a 
more doubtful encounter. 

But we have not far to look for the causes of its 
rapid fall from this culminatiDg point. We need not 
suppose any wordy hollo wness in the profession of 

* "At this day" — that is, in the time of Constantine — "his 
statues stand in many houses among the household gods ; he is 
even now regarded as a divinity ; priests, fellows, and chaplains 
(flamines) are assigned him, and whatever antiquity has prescribed 
of religious offices." Julius Capitolinus, Ch. 18 (in Coulanges). 
The Christian Emperors, down to Gratian, were regularly deified 
after their death, and had their due place in the Pagan pantheon. 



RELIGION OF THE HUMBLER CLASSES. 95 

faith made by the imperial Stoic. But his ideal of 
character seems exaggerated and strained, when 
divorced from a positive religious creed, like that 
which made the strength of Paul. At any rate, it 
left exposed some weak spots. It is significant, that 
the " decline and fall of the Eoman Empire " begins 
with the reign of his successor. Aurelius himself 
invites criticism by his indulgent fondness for Faus- 
tina ; it was even a crime against the State to leave 
that in the brutal hands of Commodus. 

That crowned gladiator must rudely shock the 
pious faith that rested on his father's calm humani- 
ties. And Commodus was the pioneer in a century 
mostly filled with the names of military adventurers 
— twenty-five in all before we come to that of Dio- 
cletian (the first who was worshipped as a god in 
his own person) — on whose character and fortunes 
that faith was completely wrecked. Whatever was 
genuine in it was more and more rapidly absorbed in 
the widening conquests of Christianity, whose type 
of incarnation was by so many degrees more pure 
and august. And the final battle of the creeds, at 
the end of the third century, may be said to have 
blotted out almost the very memory that the Pagan 
Empire had ever so much as pretended to embody 
any conception of justice, mercy, or religious truth. 

There is another phase of the popular religion, 
illustrated chiefly by funeral monuments and inscrip- 
tions, showing more of the life of the humbler classes, 
including slaves, respecting which a brief hint must 
here suffice. The cruel lot of these poor creatures 
was lightened by charitable societies and burial 



96 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 

societies among themselves. The inscriptions express 
sometimes a pious and humble trust in terms curi- 
ously like those of the Christian monuments ; some- 
times the despairing or mocking temper we might 
more naturally expect. The glimpse they give of 
family affection and kindly feeling is often very 
touching ; and helps us, better than almost any other 
thing, to understand the " good ground " in the pop- 
ular heart, where the new seed had its strongest 
growth. 

It has been necessary to speak of the long attempt 
to create a religion among the ruins of the old Pagan 
world chiefly on its formal side, — that which is 
shown in its modes of worship and its professions of 
belief. There is another side, which shows more of 
what we may call the heart of Paganism ; and of this 
a word remains to be said. 

It is no lesson of antiquarian curiosity, but of the 
latest experience, that religious passion is quite as 
much to be dreaded as any other form of human 
passion. Perhaps, indeed, no other passion has gen- 
erated so much of frenzy, cruelty, and hate. The 
ancient Eomans did well, from their point of view, 
to look with dread and dislike on all excesses of 
religious emotion, particularly that which invaded 
from the East, always the hot-bed and nursery of 
fanaticism. When the delirious rites of Bacchus 
were first known in Eome, and especially their effect 
on female worshippers, it was with a panic of genu- 
ine terror that the Senate undertook to keep it at 
bay, at the cost of tortures and bloody executions.* 
* Liv. xxxix. 8-18 (b. c. 185). 



MAGIC AND HUMAN SACEIFICE. 97 

This was about the time of the first contact of 
Eome with the East. Two centuries later, under 
Augustus and Tiberius, many an Oriental superstition 
was well naturalized in Eome. Isis and Serapis 
were fashionable divinities. Magic, sorcery, and all 
manner of religious frenzy, were chronic symptoms 
of the popular mind. Virgil's Pharmaceutria and 
Horace's Canidia are the familiar types of these 
wild superstitions.. Their home was in the East. 
And with them came to Eome the crueller rites, the 
self-mutilations and the bloody sacrifices, that belong 
to the worship of Cybele, Dionysus, and the rest. 

Now sacrifice in the earlier time, among the Greeks 
and Eomans, had little if any of the expiatory char- 
acter afterwards given to it. There was not much, in 
those days, of the feeling of remorse ; crime itself 
was rather fatality than guilt ; the Furies that pur- 
sued Orestes were charmed away by no slaughter of 
an innocent victim, but by a grave decision of the 
real nature of his deed. There was sacrifice of human 
victims — by Druids in the woods of Gaul ; by bar- 
barians on savage coasts ; by Greeks or Eomans in 
moments of extreme terror ; by the Carthaginians, a 
Tyrian colony, who thought to avert the ruin ,of their 
city by slaying two hundred of their noblest children 
before their Canaanitish gods. 

But the ordinary act of sacrifice was simply an act 
of thanksgiving, or an offering to avert some natural 
calamity, not an atonement for the sin of the soul. 
The father of the household, in killing the creature 
destined for the daily meal, was priest as well as 
provider, and set apart the due portion to the house- 

5 G 



98 THE MIND OF PAGANISM. 

hold divinity. This was simply a deliberate but 
rather awkward " grace before meat." " A tender 
lamb from the fold shall often stain the altar " which 
Tityrus has built to the divine benefactor (who " will 
always be a god " to him) that has restored his farm. 
This, as far as we see, was the old Greek or Koman 
notion. The more solemn public acts of sacrifice 
were acts of divination, not the atonement of national 
guilt — of which there might seem great need. 

The meagre simplicity of ancient rites, as well as 
the timid scruple in their performance, and perhaps 
a quickened intensity of moral feeling, had something 
to do with the eager and passionate reception of for- 
eign custom. The Eastern temper in such things was 
fervid, passionate, often delirious, sometimes brutal. 
How it allied itself with practice of magic, evoking of 
spirits, and what we should call animal magnetism — 
curiously like the practice of spiritists in our own 
day — belongs more to the latest phase of Paganism, 
and the extravagances of the Neo-Platonists. But the 
bloody sacrificial rites of the East were quite in keep- 
ing with the peculiar brutality of public temper which 
we find in the earlier Empire. 

These rites went all the way from personal mutila- 
tions, more or less severe, to the ghastly performance 
of the taurobolmm, in which the worshipper stood in a 
pit below a perforated platform, and was drenched 
from head to foot in the shower-bath of blood that 
gushed from the slaughtered bull above.* This hor- 
rible ritual was held to be a ransom from all guilt, 
and a pledge of blessedness in this life and the next.f 

* The criobolium was the similar sacrifice of a ram. 

t In cetemum renatus. (See Prudentius, Perist., x. 1011.) 



INCARNATION AND SACRIFICE. 99 

As the worshipper, reeking and dripping with the 
sanguine torrent, passed out through the crowd, others 
pressed about him, to win some share, by a touch or 
stain, in the magic efficacy of that atoning rite. It is 
this strange custom of later Paganism, quite as much 
as the Levitical tradition of the Old Testament, that 
gives emphasis to the words written to the Hebrews : 
" If the blood of bulls and goats sanctifieth, how much 
more the blood of Christ ! " and again, " It is not pos- 
sible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take 
away sin." 

We have, then, in the mind of Paganism at this 
epoch, the two characteristic religious ideas of the age 
— Incarnation and expiatory Sacrifice — distinctly 
conceived and plainly developed, though in forms 
that make them more a travesty than a counterpart 
of the same ideas in the Christian creed. The impor- 
tant thing to notice in them is, that they are the ideas 
of that age. They are not peculiar to Christianity: it 
would be truer to say that in origin and essence they 
are rather Pagan than Christian. That they had a 
powerful effect in shaping the Christian belief, there 
can be no doubt. At least, they predisposed the mind 
of the Eoman world to accept that belief so broadly 
and so easily as it did. The rapid decline of Paganism 
in the third century, and the sudden change that 
shows the whole Empire Christian at the end of it, 
are facts to be accounted for on the common ground 
of history so far as may be. The triumph of the latter 
cannot be understood, as a human event, without an 
understanding of those causes, working from within, 
which predisposed mankind to receive it. 



V. 
THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY. 

THE one period of Christian history which most 
fascinates the imagination at first sight, is that 
when the new faith came to the throne of empire- in 
the person of Constantine the Great. 

And this first attraction is fully borne out by the 
real interest of the characters and events — though 
not in the way we might have thought at first. To 
the Christians, suddenly released from a great stress 
and dread of persecution, it would seem, no doubt, the 
coming of a perfect day, and the establishing of the 
kingdom they had prayed for, once for all. But then 
came the inevitable recoil and disappointment. Con- 
stantine was no saint, at best, and a very doubtful 
Christian ; but a victorious general, a suspicious and 
wary politician ; a man of some very great and noble 
qualities, indeed, but stained by one or two dark 
crimes. The religion he protected was no sooner in a 
place of security and power than smothered jealousies 
burst out, and religious feuds began, and the Empire 
rang with the noise of a controversy — often unintel- 
ligible as it was disgraceful — whose fame is hardly 
diminished to this day. 

The Arian Controversy has these two points of 
interest for us. It is in itself one of the most dra- 



DOCTRINE OF THE DIVINE WORD. 101 

matic and eventful chapters in the whole history of 
human opinion, turning on the adventures, character, 
and animosities of three or four leading actors, to- 
gether with the liv r ely passions of great multitudes 
of partisans ; and, secondly, it fixed for a great many 
generations the type of the dominant belief, giving an 
answer to the question, What sort of a system, intel- 
lectual or religious, should come to take the place of 
the dying Paganism ? These two make, so to speak, 
the pivots which sustain our interest and steady our 
understanding of it. 

It is not hard to trace in outline the development 
of speculative opinion which prepared the way for 
this extraordinary outburst of religious rage. This, 
however, belongs to the history of doctrine, and need 
not be dwelt on here. That the opinion became a 
passion, and the motive of deadly controversy lasting 
through centuries, turned on circumstances in the 
history, and on principles of human conduct, not 
so directly obvious. First, however, a few words are 
needed as to the nature of the controversy itself. 

The doctrine of the Divine Word (Logos) as mani- 
fest in the human life of Jesus had for some two 
centuries been the accepted key to the interpretation 
of the Christian Gospel. More or less vaguely, the 
Word was held to take the place of the human soul 
in him, or to be intimately united with it, so that, in 
virtue of it, and the Divine nature which it implied, 
he became the Christ. 

But the term Logos itself has a double meaning. 
On one hand, it is identical with the Divine Wisdom, 
— which is, in fact, constantly used as its equivalent, 



102 THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY. 

both by the Greek and Latin writers ; and in this 
sense it is simply the name of an Attribute of the 
Creator. On the other hand (by the habit of mind 
already spoken of in considering the Gnostic genealo- 
gies) it is easily, unconsciously, continually hyposta- 
tized, — that is, regarded as an independent Substance, 
or quasi-Personality ; and in this sense, as a pre- 
existent Divine Person, is especially identified with 
the Christ, 

It is clear that we may make either of these con- 
ceptions prominent, so as to overshadow or dwarf the 
other ; and we shall do this according as the habit of 
our mind is mystical on one side, or rationalizing on 
the other. The mystic, reverential, imaginative mood 
dwells upon the Attribute, which it tends more and 
more to merge in absolute Divinity, in the direction 
of a religious Pantheism. The rational, analytic, crit- 
icising mood dwells upon the Substance, or Person 
(hypostasis)* which it tends more and more to make 
distinct and separate, and therefore a logically de- 
pendent and inferior being. To the first, the Logos 
as Divine Wisdom is necessarily coeternal with God 
himself, as light with the source of light. To the 
second, the Logos as a Divine Person is necessarily 
inferior to and (so to speak) younger than the Infinite, 
just as a son is younger than his father. To the first, 
Christ is the Son of God figuratively, by eternal gen- 
eration ; to the second, he is the Son of God literally, 
as the " first-born of the creation." 

This radical difference of mental constitution and 

* Explained by Gregory of Nyssa as bearing the same relation 
to the individual as Substance (ovcria) to the class. 



THEOLOGICAL PASSION. 103 

habit repeats itself in all the phases of the contro- 
versy that followed. The mystic tendency * appears 
as an exaggerated orthodoxy, later known by the 
names Monophysite and Monothelete, till it runs out 
into the peculiar fanaticism of certain Oriental sects, 
to whom Christ is the sole and essential Deity. The 
rationalistic tendency f shows itself as a harassing 
and incessant criticism, quite as intolerant as its 
adversary, not repudiating but putting its own inter- 
pretation on the accepted creed, exiled at length as 
Nestorianism, under which name it subsists in the 
East to this day. The narrow line of the church 
faith, between these contrary drifts of opinion, has 
its landmarks fixed in the decisions of the first four 
General (or (Ecumenical) Councils. J 

This central line of doctrine, it is almost needless 
to say, runs a good deal nearer to the mystic than to 
the rationalizing opinion. In religious controversy, 
it is not half so important that men should under- 
stand their creed, as it is that they should hold it in 
some well-defined symbol appealing strongly to the 
imagination. And we misunderstand both the age 
of Martyrdom, and the age of Controversy that im- 
mediately followed, unless we see how the fervor, 
nay, often the frenzy, of a passionate conviction — so 
nurtured by the incessant discipline of the Church 
when belief in it was a matter of life and death — 
w r ill cling to what from outside seems a mere passion- 

* Eepresented by the names of Sabellius, Apollinaris, and 
Eutyches. 

t Represented by Arius, Eunoraius, and Nestorius. 

$ Viz. that of Nieaea (325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431), 
and Chalcedon (451). 



104 THE AEIAN CONTROVERSY. 

less abstraction. The Dutch Eepublic, once free from 
terror of the Spaniard, went straight into disputes 
about predestination that risked its hard-bought liber- 
ties, and cost the noble Barneveldt his head. What 
can be more a mere abstraction, a mere identical 
equation in logic, than There is no God hut God 1 ? 
Yet the phrase in which it rings on the battle-field 
to-day hurls masses of Moslem fanatics against Eus- 
sian intrench ments, and piles them dead or dying in 
the ditch, just as, seven hundred years ago, it hurled 
myriads of Saracens against the steel-clad ranks of 
the Crusaders. It is the symbol, not the thing, for 
which men oftenest stake their lives. In deliberate 
sober thought we choose the policy we think most 
wise and safe, — the theory of State-rights or the 
theory of the Eepublic one and indivisible ; but in 
the fury of battle men think less of that than of the 
visible sign of it, the Stars and Stripes against the 
Stars and Bars ! 

Now it happened once in Alexandria, not far from 
the time we are approaching, that a certain Bishop 
Alexander was zealously expounding to his audience 
this cardinal point of Christian faith. They were 
lately at rest from a time of persecution, ready and 
hot for controversy. It was probably the exposition 
of the religious symbol in some such cheap religious 
rhetoric as most of us have heard : as that the glori- 
ous Sun in heaven represents the Father ; his Light, 
the eternal Word; his Heat, the life-giving Spirit; 
and so on. But the smooth discourse was cut short 
by the cry of heresy. " That is the false doctrine of 
Sabellius ! " said a voice in the crowd. Now Sabel- 



SABELLIUS AND ARIUS. 105 

lius, most pious and unsuspecting of heretics, had 
preached, a few years "before, a sort of " modal trin- 
ity," very much to the same effect. The voice was 
the voice of Arius, a presbyter, no friend of the bishop, 
of temper restless and litigious, an uncomfortable an- 
tagonist in a war of words. In person slender and 
tall, of features fine-cut and rather sharp ; in manner 
courteous ; careful and somewhat elegant in dress ; 
ready of speech, and gifted with a certain keenness 
to fasten on the weak point of his adversary's state- 
ment, and follow it out in a teasing, exasperating way 
to some point of real or seeming contradiction ; and, 
withal, a man who would not be silenced or put 
down. 

It is not likely that either opponent could state his 
point so as to be very clear to us, or, at any rate, so 
as to seem at all solvable by the human mind. After 
many centuries, and whole libraries of dispute, it is, 
we may say, as far from being solved as ever. If 
Christ is the Son, said Arius, he must be younger ^ 
than the Father, if only by a single moment out of all 
eternity, and so dependent on him ; or, in the test- 
phrase of Arianism, " there was when the Son did not 
yet exist." * Nay, was the reply, he is the eternal Son 
of the eternal Father : to deny his equal eternity is to 
say that the Sun in heaven can exist without giving 
light and heat. 

And so the dispute went on. It turned on a very 
fine point, — one, we might say, invisible to the naked 
eye ; and there was nothing for it but the incessant 

* Not, " there was a time when " : the Logos was non-existent 
only in eternity, before time was. 

5* 



106 THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY. 

repetition and reiteration of the same words. The 
discussion is very weary to follow, and it seems to 
lead us nowhere. If we take the term Logos (which 
is masculine in Greek) to signify merely an Attribute, 
— conscious intelligence of the Eternal, — it is a sim- 
ple and intelligible symbol to speak of it as the Son 
by eternal generation. If we take it to mean a Per- 
son, it seems impossible not to distinguish it, by some 
grade of dignity or precedence, from the Eternal One. 
The arguments of Arius seem the incessant sharp 
rattling of a logic-mill, like those windy disputes of 
Sophists in Plato : those of his opponents — we may 
look through many a hundred of the pages that record 
them, without finding one that any man now would 
care to repeat or answer. 

If we would understand the importance of the 
Arian controversy, then, we must find it not in what 
is wilful, personal, dramatic in the story, — least of 
all in the speculative opinion on either side, what 
seems so absolutely apart from anything that we un- 
derstand or care about to-day ; but in what lies behind 
it and around it. It is really the great feature, the 
one visible feature, of the intellectual history of a 
time critical as any in the religious and social desti- 
nies of mankind. 

Let us transport ourselves now to the time when 
this controversy came to a head in the Council at 
JSTicsea (325). If we look back fifty years, we see the 
vast intellectual and political system of Paganism — 
to all outward appearance as vast and formidable as 
ever — just preparing to put forth all its forces in a 
final effort to suppress that threatening, unceasing, in- 



A COMPARISON OF CREEDS. 107 

sidious growth of the Christian system, and on the 
edge of its last, most obstinate, and most cruel perse- 
cution. If we look forward fifty years, we find the 
same Paganism idealized in a new and arrogant sys- 
tem of philosophy, contending for intellectual and 
political revival with a speculative zeal and moral 
pretensions fully equal to the Christianity of the day, 
— a sort of eclectic or transcendental free religion, as 
brilliantly described in Kingsley's " Hypatia." 

How was it, then, that in the middle of this cen- 
tury of revolution, enveloped right and left by the 
political forces, the philosophical systems, and the 
menacing fanaticisms of the older civilization, Chris- 
tians had time or heart to rage so furiously together ? 
And how was it that, in spite of a conflict which 
seemed to consume all its strength, Christianity came 
out of it in a hundred years stronger than ever, the 
only live organized power to stay the tides of barbar- 
ism ; at the end of five hundred years, the base and 
the ideal of a new Christian Empire, already rivalling 
the power and dignity of the old ; at the end of a 
thousand years, in possession of a dominion which 
seemed to Dante then as secure as the circles of his 
Hell, or the portals of his Paradise ? 

There are two answers to this question, one con- 
sisting in the nature of the thing itself which was at 
issue between Paganism and Christianity ; the other 
in a comparison of the two rival Christian creeds, 
Arian and Athanasian. 

First, it is not very hard to trace the genealogy of 
opinion. The laws of thought are uniform, and intel- 
lectual systems unfold naturally and easily by a 



108 THE AM AN CONTROVERSY. 

method of their own. So far as mere opinion goes, I 
do not see in the least why Paganism did not furnish 
materials of a system quite as likely to satisfy a 
thoughtful man of that day, as the Christianity of the 
first three centuries. In fact, we see that it did so 
satisfy many of the very best and wisest men of the 
time : Tacitus, the stern historian ; his friend Pliny, 
the courteous and accomplished Eoman gentleman ; 
Plutarch, the biographer of pagan heroes and critic of 
pagan morals ; both the Antonines, wisest and best of 
statesmen ; Galen, the pious and enlightened physiolo- 
gist ; Epictetus, most patient, shrewd, and austere of 
moralists. 

Why should such men burden themselves with 
Jewish or Galilsean legends that to them must seem 
foolish and incredible ? Did not the caustic wisdom of 
Socrates, the high philosophy of Plato, the scientific 
breadth of Aristotle, the elevated and pure theism of 
Cicero, above all, the large life, the political experi- 
ence, and the manifold culture of pagan antiquity, — 
did not these furnish materials for a religious system 
incomparably more broad, rich, and true than the nar- 
row creed of Palestine ? 

And then* too, could not a wise eclecticism adopt 
and engraft upon it whatever seemed really worth 
retaining of the fervid religious life, the " enthusiasm 
of humanity," the methods of mutual help, in the 
Christian body ? So it seems, at least, to many en- 
lightened and cultivated people of our own day ; and 
so the thought must have crossed the mind of Paul, 
himself an enlightened and cultivated man, when he 
saw with a sort of amazement how God had chosen 



THE METHOD OF FAITH. 109 

the foolish things of the world to confound the 
wise, and weak things to confound the mighty, and 
base things to bring to naught the haughty and 
strong. 

But no. The history of opinion is one thing ; the 
history of faith is another thing. Faith belongs to ) 
emotion, character, and will. It is capable of passion, 
of enthusiasm, of obstinate courage. It can disdain 
reason, and trample argument under foot. It cares 
for reason or argument only as a weapon of attack : 
its only weapon of defence is confidence in itself. It 
has its own laws of growth, which resemble more the 
spreading of flame than the skilful joining of archi- 
tecture. It has its own methods of conquest, of which 
the chief is to kindle and sedulously to nurture an 
unreasoning devotion. 

So it has been with all the great victorious faiths of 
history, from Elijah to Mahomet, from Paul to Gar- 
rison. What such men call reasoning is only the 
expression of a passionate conviction ; the method of 
instruction such men employ is the contagion of their 
own ardent thought. In the great struggle against 
Paganism, the inheriting of that power, the secret of 
that method, was with the Christians, and not with 
their opponents. What cool and unprejudiced reason 
might have chosen or might have done is not to the 
point. I have often asked myself, in the controversies - 
of our own day, whether reason might not have 
brought better and safer results than fanaticism ; and 
the only answer I could find was, that what we call 
fanaticism is one of the great forces that impel man- 
kind, while reason is not. Reason at best may serve, 



110 THE ARIAN* CONTROVERSY. 

in some small degree, as pilot or brakeman , the flame 
and vapor are from quite another source. 

In the second place, it is part of the method of 
faith, that it scorns anything that looks like compro- 
mise with its opponents. Compromise may be had 
after the victory is gained, but not while the fight is 
going on. Now Arianism was, in fact, as a system, 
very high-toned, nay almost extravagant, in its Chris- 
tian profession. In asserting for Christ a super- 
angelic pre-existence all but absolute and eternal, it 
claimed for him as much as could be forced from the 
very highest expressions of reverence in the Alex- 
andrine phraseology of Paul or John ; infinitely more 
than could be found in the earlier and more authentic 
gospel. But observe. In that phrase all hut, there 
lurked a flaw of heresy, of weakness, of compromise 
with the common enemy. Surely, in the light of 
simple reason, it were better to accept frankly the 
simple humanity of Jesus, to treat the nativity as a 
myth, the miracles as legends, and the resurrection as 
a glorious illusion ; or else to say, just as frankly, that 
Jesus was God in the flesh, — his temptations, his suf- 
ferings, his prayers, a mere dramatic exhibition, or a 
mysterious by-play of his divine and human nature. 
At least, the first is intelligible reason, and the last 
is sublime faith in a glorified humanity. Either is 
better than that nondescript illogical compromise 
which is known as Arianism. 

And again, it was something worse than a logical 
flaw. Did it not make Christ the " Son of God," 
after all, very much in the same way that Jupiter 
was the son of Saturn, and Mars of Jupiter ? Did 



THE DRIFT OF ARIANISM. Ill 

it not open the way for all the shocking possibilities, 
for all the blasphemous compromises, of a mongrel 
paganism, — nay, to all the horrible vices and cor- 
ruptions that had grown out of the old worships of 
paganism ? If Christians too are to worship a Divin- 
ity who is after all not the Supreme God, what are 
they better than their enemies ? Did they, too, not 
worship sons of God, — Apollo, Hercules, Bacchus, 
and the rest ? Had not some pagan emperors — the 
brutal Commodus as well as the good Severus — con- 
sented in advance to such a compromise, and even 
admitted Jesus of Nazareth to the generous Roman 
pantheon ? Had not the best of all the emperors, 
Trajan and Aurelius, proved the impossibility of that 
compromise by persecuting the Christian faith ? 

We need not suppose that all these thoughts came 
in at once, to make the feud so bitter as it proved to 
be. But they all lay behind, more or less conscious- 
ly, to make the controversy obstinate and bitter under 
the successors of Constantine in a later age. For 
then Arianism had come to be a court party. Its 
perilous drift towards compromise was seen then, 
plainly, on the side of politics, — where it seemed 
somehow to flatter the self-love and fondness for 
power of a despotic house ; as it was seen, too, in 
the fact which broadly marks its destiny in history, 
that it kept strong hold of the speculative and sub- 
tile Greek mind, and remained an apple of discord in 
the East, taking many shapes and hues, one creed 
having (we are told) no less than twenty-seven 
anathemas appended to cover so many shadings of 
dissent ; while the central, catholic, domineering, 



112 THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY. 

uncompromising faith held almost undisputed ground 
in the West, where it became the basis of the most 
vast and imposing spiritual dominion ever known. 

The Nicene Creed, so called, is still the authentic 
expression of that faith, as read in the liturgies of 
to-day. It is true that the Nicene Creed was itself a 
sort of compromise, prepared at the summons of Con- 
stantine, whose motive was more than half political ; 
and signed, with whatever demur, (it is stated, rather 
doubtfully,) by Arius himself, who presently found 
himself high in favor with the imperial court. < But 
its historical importance is very great ; and, as the 
central act of a most extraordinary drama, it demands 
a few words of mention. 

We cannot do justice to the very perplexing char- 
acter of Constantine, unless we think of him, with all 
his faults, as a man of strong, generous impulses, very 
much dominated at times by a vivid imagination. It 
was something more than policy, it was a natural 
effect of the impressive, nay, appalling situation in 
which he found himself, — at the head of a force 
largely Christian marching against the rude and fierce 
Maxentius, who had mustered whatever there was in 
Eome of fanatic attachment to the old religion or 
fanatic hatred of the new, — that he saw, or seemed 
to see, a flaming cross in the sky at noon, and set that 
sign above the crimson banner, the Labarum, under 
which his army went, cheerful and strong, to certain 
victory. A triumph in open battle against the old gods 
of Eome in person ! What an appeal to excited imagi- 
nation on one side, to despairing frenzy on the other ! 

And again, when he traced the outline of his new 



CONSTANTINE. 113 

capital, the most felicitous choice ever made for the 
seat of a great Empire, he asserted, and probably be- 
lieved, that he was acting by Divine guidance. " I 
must keep on," said he to his officers, amazed at the 
wide plan he traced, " till the God who goes before 
me stops." A man of strong imagination, lifted sud- 
denly into a great success, comes (as Napoleon did) to 
look on his own acts and destiny with a certain awe : 
he easily thinks himself a man of destiny. Sylla be- 
lieved in his star, and Caesar in his descent from 
gods ; and it was a like feeling, half reverent, half 
superstitious, that impelled Constantine, under cir- 
cumstances far more impressive and strange, to set 
up in his new City that extraordinary symbol of 
empire, the statue of Apollo, or the Sun-god, with 
a head made in his own likeness, surrounded by 
gilded rays, which, said popular belief, were nails of 
the true cross, miraculously discovered to the em- 
peror's mother. 

It is interesting, too, and very touching, amid so 
much that is pitiless and stern, to see how the con- 
queror really wished to be the father of his people. 
Deserted children, who before had been sold as slaves, 
were adopted as the emperor's own.* It was a 
shameful thing, he said, that any of his people should 
perish of hunger, or be forced to crime by stress of 
actual want. It was cruel that mothers and children, 
brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, should be 
torn apart in the slave-market : let that be forbidden 
at any public sale. 

* The first orphan asylum had been founded by Trajan, two 
hundred years before. 



114 THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY. 

This sentiment of justice, or humanity, could not 
ripen into a firm policy then. At more than fifteen cen- 
turies' distance we are only groping about the problem 
now. It resulted in little else than making Constanti- 
nople a privileged city, which in that day meant a city 
of paupers and courtiers. The dry-rot of the Empire 
was hardly checked. The heart of society was perish- 
ing by slow decay. The old Eoman valor w T as well- 
nigh extinct. The Eoman state had to defend itself 
by legions of Goths, whom it hired, cheated of their pay, 
enslaved their children, and drove into a frenzy of 
hate, till within fifty years from the building of the 
splendid capital the emperor (Valens) was burned alive 
in the hut to which he fled from the great disaster of 
Adrianople (369), and the spell was forever broken 
by which the name of Koine had charmed and awed 
the barbarian world. 

These calamities could not be foreseen or averted 
by Constantine. Yet he must have felt the slippery 
peril of his elevation. Some forty years before, Dio- 
cletian — whose name is linked by a cruel destiny 
with the persecution of Galerius, which he would have 
been only too glad to stay * — had tried to check the 
break-up of that great military empire by dividing it 
among four closely allied sovereigns. A tempest of 
disorder, following his abdication, had compelled Con- 
stantine to reduce it again under a single head. The 
old gods of Borne had been, so to speak, literally met 
and defeated in open battle under the standard of the 
Cross. None of the ancient sanctities adhered to the 
new dominion. Whatever Constantine's sincerity in 

* See Lactantius, De Mortibus Persecutorum, ch. xi. 



COUNCIL OF NIOffiA. 115 

accepting the faith under whose symbol he had con- 
quered, at least the formula of that faith must not be 
left to angry and endless disputes among the professors 
of it ; and so he called together that most famous of 
all Church Councils which met at Nicsea to settle 
once for all the authentic creed (325). 

Here, again, it is easiest to look upon the scene as 
it appeared to the imagination and human feeling of 
Constantine himself. When he advanced, tall and 
stately, in imperial robes and attended by the impe- 
rial guards, to preside in the sacred assembly, — he, 
the champion of the Cross, the deliverer from per- 
secution, the restorer of peace to a stormy world, — 
there was no bound to the genuine homage of the 
throng that saluted him, as if he had been a god in 
human shape, or at least an angel, and " equal to an 
apostle." And he on his part saw them there, scarred 
veterans (as it were) of a long and terrible campaign, 
living witnesses of a martyrdom in which many 
of them had shared the torment, though not the 
palm. So bruised and mutilated, this man wanting 
an eye, and that an arm or leg, they seemed war- 
worn soldiers, who, having served out their term, 
were summoned once more to do battle for the faith. 
To one old man, whose eye had been plucked out and 
scarred by a firebrand, the emperor went up tenderly, 
and kissed with his own lips the scorched and empty 
socket, as if some healing virtue were in the scar ; or 
rather, with a deep touch of human feeling, to say by 
that symbol how near those horrors lay to his own 
compassionate heart. It was wise and generous, too, 
as well as politic, when he took all their memorials of 



116 THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY. 

personal grievances and burned them unread before 
their eyes. " Let the God of all things judge," said 
he. " Eespect yourselves and respect your office, as 
I myself would cover up any fault of yours with my 
official robe." 

The discussion so auspiciously begun had the usual 
fortunes of theological debate, — " like a battle by 
night," says one of the old historians ; so little could 
either party know the ground it stood on. It lasted 
two months. It produced, by judicious compromise 
and careful definition, what is known as the " ^ficene 
Creed," a document of some twenty lines, which was 
signed by the delegates, three hundred and eighteen 
in all. Some signed it under protest, or filed ex- 
ceptions to particular phrases ; but to Constantine it 
was a state paper of first-rate importance, not a mat- 
ter of speculative nicety, and he firmly insisted that 
all should sign. The test-word in it was the Greek 
word rendered con-suhstantial ; * and this has been 
the badge of orthodoxy ever since. 

But the history of the Arian controversy was not 
ended at Mcsea, only just begun. It lasted with great 
violence some forty years, incessantly disturbing the 
peace of the state. The terms of truce were not (so 
to speak) officially defined before the Council of Chal- 
cedon (451) ; the animosities of debate have not ab- 
solutely disappeared at this day. For forty years, 
however, it was an event in history, turning mostly 
on the personal fortunes, efforts, and adventures of 

* In Greek, bfioovaios (homoousian) , i. e. "of the same essence." 
The Greek word vTrSaraffts (hypostasis), corresponding etymologi- 
cally to " substance," was rendered in the Latin creed persona. 



ATHANASIUS. 117 

Athanasius, who from this time forth becomes the 
champion and representative of the dominant faith. 
He had been Alexander's delegate in the Council, — 
a young man then under thirty, of keen intellect, 
indomitable temper, and a vehement partisan, " tur- 
bulent, fiery, and imperious," his enemies said, " arro- 
gant, revengeful, and uncapable of being quiet." His 
attacks on his opponents are more like shrieks than 
argument. " modern Jews and disciples of Caia- 
phas ! " he hails them. " Arians ! nay, hollow Ario- 
maniacs, madmen ! They rob God of his wisdom 
and his Word. They shed their cunning heresy as 
the cuttle-fish sheds his blackness, to benighten the 
ignorant and make their falsehood safe." " A heretic 
is a wicked thing : his heart is depraved and impious 
at every point." 

Such are some of the amenities of this prince of 
controversialists. They express, it must be owned, a 
good deal more the heat than they do the light of 
his opinions. They tell how he felt, much better 
than what he thought. But it is these qualities, 
more than largeness and breadth, that give men a 
great place in the history of controversy. He is the 
one man about whom are gathered the passions of 
the struggle. Hostility, attack, the jealousy of ri- 
vals, or government prosecution, he met with the 
same defiance. 

His life shows full of daring, of ready wit, of dra- 
matic incident. As Bishop of Alexandria (where in 
his childhood he had played boy-bishop, as Cyrus 
played boy-king), he was charged with monstrous 
crimes, — peculation and fraud, sacrilege and murder, 



118 THE AEIAN CONTROVERSY. 

— the murder of one Arsenius, whom his accusers (he 
says) kept hid two years to give color to their charge. 
One piece of evidence was the dead man's hand, used 
by him, they said, in magic rites. Disdaining direct 
reply, he led forth a man muffled in a cloak, and 
asked, " Does any one here know Arsenius ? " He 
was known to many. He uncovered the man's face : 
it was Arsenius himself. Lifting the cloak on either 
side, he showed first the right hand, then the left. 
" Show me where the third was cut off," said he, 
coolly. This was his whole defence. 

Again, pushing up the Nile once in his little boat, 
in flight from Julian, he was nearly overtaken by 
armed men in pursuit. Heading boldly down stream, 
he soon reached them, when they hailed him : " Is 
Athanasius near ? " " Close by" said he ; and so 
passed on unmolested, and lay safe hid in Alexan- 
dria, while they toiled vainly towards the desert. 
Five times an exile, twice in Gaul or Eome, once 
in the deserts of Upper Egypt, once for four months 
hiding in his father's tomb, he was at length allowed 
to live eleven years in peace, till his death at the age 
of seventy-six (373). 

But it is far from my intention to give a biography 
of Athanasius, or to tell the story of the time. One 
is pretty safe to find in Gibbon a sufficiently accurate 
travesty of the event : its real history is in thick vol- 
umes of narrative and controversy of the old Greek 
Fathers. There are only two points which I wish to 
present in closing. 

First, in the final defeat of the Arian party, Chris- 
tianity was saved from being a political or speculative 



RESULTS OF THE CONTROVERSY. 119 

sect, and saved to be a great social and reconstructive 
force. It is, perhaps, the misfortune of Arianism, that 
judgment must go against it by default. We know 
it mostly by report of its adversaries. But that judg- 
ment is, that it began with disputatious quibbling 
about words ; that it did not enlist the better reli- 
gious feeling ; and that its strength, when it had any, 
lay in the alliance of the Court. 

The " Catholic faith," so called, on the other hand, 
was very positive and explicit ; unintelligible, no 
doubt, but dogmatic and imperative, demanding and 
receiving a loyalty that did not stay to reason. Christ 
is very God of very God was the challenge thrown 
down to all heresy and unbelief : a phrase that might 
not satisfy the enlightened reason, but attracted the 
fervent, passionate, exultant acceptance of whole pop- 
ulations. Its root and strength were in that unrea- 
soning — if you will, fanatic — loyalty. Its defence, 
for forty years, lay in the intrepidity of a single man, 
— ardent, whole-souled, uncompromising, the one 
man then living who dared openly to defy an em- 
peror's will. 

Athanasius was not a great man ; perhaps he was 
not a just man ; but he was, in his way, a very strong 
man. He knew well how to appeal to men's im- 
agination, sympathy, reverence. And the stamp lie 
gave to the creed of his day was just what was 
wanted to keep the faith hot and intense, as a work- 
ing force. 

Again, there is a broader way in which this con- 
troversy has told on Christian history. As against 
his antagonists, the triumph of Athanasius was the 



120 THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY. 

triumph of Europe and of Eome. Eome was then 
the one metropolitan church of the world unrent by- 
theological feuds, first and last a stanch defender of 
the faith and of its exiled champion. The dividing 
line between Eastern and Western Church, so sharply 
drawn that at this very day the Pope prefers that the 
infidel Turk should triumph rather than the Orthodox 
Eussian, begins to appear in history about this time. 
The symbol of this division is a phrase (filioque) 
which the Eoman Church long after appended to the 
Catholic creed, claiming that the Son is one with the 
Father as the source of spiritual grace. 

Now the quarrel is none of ours ; we are quite 
neutral in the theological debate between " orthodox " 
and " catholic." But it is a very great matter for us 
— for better or worse, and (we may fairly claim) much 
for the better — that our civilization, on its political, 
religious, and social side, is the inheritance of the 
West, and not the East. The overwhelming defeat 
of the imperial army by the Goths, five years after 
Athanasius's death, was the signal of the fall of that 
avalanche of barbarian invasion which presently over- 
whelmed the Eoman world. Under the terror of that 
disaster, the Empire took refuge with a chief of ortho- 
dox piety, Theodosius the Great, part of whose work 
was to give imperial prestige to the ecclesiastical 
power — in the person of the great Ambrose — which 
was presently going to be the salvation of the West. 

More than anything else, it was just then impor- 
tant that the power to organize society and create the 
institutions of the future should be a moral power. 
And that was the same as saying that it should rest 



THE REAL ALTERNATIVE. 121 

on a religious conviction held with unreasoning fervor, 
denned in a symbol positive enough to enlist like a 
flag the passionate loyalty of multitudes of men. A 
decaying civilization, a perishing social fabric, a polit- 
ical framework battered and just yielding before a 
frightful tempest of invasion, a decrepit Paganism, 
guilty of vices that might not be named and cruelties 
not to be recalled without horror, — these were on 
one side; and on the other, the sublime faith, held 
with whatever of unreason, turbulence, or feud, that 
Almighty God had once lived bodily among men, 
and that He did really in person lead them now in 
the fight against His enemies. 



VI. 

SAINT AUGUSTINE. 

AUGUSTINE, called " greatest of the Fathers," 
was born in North Africa in 354 ; was Bishop 
of Hippo (now Bona) from the year 395 ; and died 
during the siege of this important city by the Vandals, 
in 430. His fame is very great in the history of 
religious opinion. It rests mainly on his doctrine of 
Predestination, and his theory of inborn Evil to be 
overcome only by the sovereign grace of God. But 
his influence belongs far more to his warm, devout, 
and impassioned temperament, to his eager, incessant 
activity in the offices of the Church, and to the 
transparent exhibition which he has made of himself 
in his Confessions, — a long and detailed account of 
his religious life, made throughout in the form of an 
act of devotion, or direct address to the Deity. 

It is not easy for a modern mind to think of 
Augustine as so great a man, intellectually, as he is 
generally claimed to be, or as perhaps he really was. 
In particular, he seems to want the power, which a 
really great mind has, of making a clear, coherent 
statement of opinion, especially of opinion which 
he has outgrown and is controverting. It would, for 
example, be worth a. good deal to us if he had left us 
an intelligible account of the Manichgean heresy, 



HIS OPINIONS AND CHARACTER. 123 

from the point of view of a believer, or even of a past 
believer in it. As to this, we are obliged to consider 
it more in the view suggested from its enormous, 
seemingly disproportionate consequence in the his- 
tory of opinion — as an object of hate and terror 
from its origin, about a hundred years before, down 
even to the destruction of the Templars about nine 
hundred years after the time of Augustine — than in 
the violently refracted light thrown on it in his own 
writings. 

And again, his cardinal doctrine of Predestination 
is a, purely technical and unscientific account of the 
origin of good and evil. With all his passion for 
abstract discussion, it has no more real basis in the 
science of thought than it has in the science of things. 
And it must definitely pass away — in the form Au- 
gustine gave to it, and which was all he cared for in 
it — under the different habits of thought that come 
from a different mode of investigation. In fact, he 
had a very sincere, what we should call a holy horror 
of science, in the only form of it known in his day. 
Mathematicians and astronomers, he thought, were 
prying impiously into the secrets of the Most High ■ 
and his repugnance to their line of study was only 
less vehement than his repugnance to sin itself. 

Still further, as Mr. Lecky shows, the influence of 
Augustine in the development of character, in the 
direction of moral goodness, itself requires to be 
challenged, or at least to be taken with large abate- 
ment. In the direction of personal piety it needs no 
such abatement. Perhaps no other writings than his, 
except the Hebrew Psalms, have done quite so much, 



124 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 

directly or indirectly, to lift men's minds into the 
temper of penitence, humility, and adoration. But 
piety is not all ; it is not even the chief thing to be 
considered. Paul puts charity before it. Now charity 
— that human love which has no soil of human pas- 
sion — is of two sorts, and works in two directions. 
As growing out of tenderness and sympathy/and lead- 
ing to acts of mercy, Augustine was a noble example 
of it. To personal opponents he was generous ; in 
the treatment of heresy he was magnanimous ; in a 
time of great calamity he was foremost to set the ex- 
ample of self-sacrifice and devoted service in behalf of 
the suffering and needy. 

But there is another working-out of charity, which 
consists in expanding men's notion of what goodness 
is, and must go along with intellectual breadth as 
well as pious fervor. It is not to condemn Augustine 
personally, to say that the very glow of his religious 
conviction, narrowed as it were to a focus upon a sin- 
gle point of faith, made the effect of it perilous, in 
some ways very mischievous, when the heat of it 
caught a mind of baser temper and less generous zeal. 
Hatred of sin in himself made him very tender of 
sinners, in whose evil he saw the reflex of his own ; 
but it could easily turn, in other men, into a fanatic 
hatred of those whom their narrow judgment con- 
demned of sin. Awe at the Divine sentence passed 
on human guilt, in which he figured nothing less ter- 
rible than flames of everlasting anguish, might easily 
come in them to justify any violence of threat and 
torture by which they could lessen the chances of 
that -appalling doom. And so that one enormous, un- 



HIS PLACE IN HISTORY. 125 

speakable horror, which shadows as if with a bloody 
pall the history of Christendom for thirteen hundred 
years, — tortures of flame, rack, dungeon, haunting 
suspicion, infamous betrayal for opinion's sake, — all 
could find a sort of pretext, and in one sense had a 
source, in the vehement, undiscriminating, unsparing 
temper of Augustine's war on the heretic Pelagians 
and the schismatic Donatists. 

It is necessary to make these large qualifications at 
the start, because really it is hard to speak of Augus- 
tine's name and influence so as to avoid mere blank 
laudation * He was a very strongly marked man, in 
his way a great man. He is generally called the 
greatest of the Fathers ; that is, of the Christian 
writers of the first six or eight centuries. Compari- 
sons are difficult in such a case : there is no scale by 
which souls can be accurately weighed ; though this 
might be allowed without ranking him very high 
among the great minds of the world. But he was, 
unquestionably, what may be called one of the great 
characters of history ; one of the very greatest moral 
forces in the region both of character and of events 
that grow from character. 

Now, when we think of a man's place in history, 
we are very apt to think of it as of the place of a 
brick in a wall, or of a statue in a niche, — as if it 
might be taken away with no other special loss ; as 
if some other might have occupied it without much 

* As a curious testimony to this eminence, it is said that at this 
day the Moors near Bona (the modern Hippo) call him, in honor, 
" the great Roman," and in pious memory of him visit every Fri- 
day the ruins of the church where he was bishop. — Ozanam, Civi- 
lisation au cinquieme Siecle, Vol. II. p. 2. 



126 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 

change in the surroundings. But, in truth, a man 
fills his place among human events very much as the 
roots of a tree fill the interstices of the soil : they 
either burrow a way by their own vital force, or a 
way is made for them, inconceivably intricate, by the 
seemingly chance adjustment of stones and mould. 
More accurately still, he fills his place like a vital 
organ in the body, itself a part of that living network 
of tissues whose fibres and cells must be reckoned by 
many millions, which it has helped and helps to 
create. So that, when we are speaking of a very great 
personal force, such as that of Augustine, it is not as 
if it were something transferable, which might have 
appeared, perhaps, in another century ; but something 
that grew out of and acted back on the innumerable 
and intricately mingled circumstances of the time. 

What, then, were those circumstances ? I must 
sketch them very broadly : we are already entering 
the twilight of the Dark Ages ; and any slightest 
glimpse we have of them shows that we are standing 
at the boundary-line of two historic periods. The 
life we are considering spans that line at midway, and 
serves as our easiest transition from one period to 
the other. 

The year 395 was one of those inexplicable times 
of panic, when prophecies fly about in the air, and a 
superstitious fear exaggerates the real terror of coming 
events. It was just three hundred and sixty-five 
years, as men reckoned, since the crucifixion of Christ. 
Thus the religion had endured for one prophetic cycle. 
A crisis had come in its destinies. Some great change 
was impending : its enemies said, to bring it to a 



A YEAR OF TERROR. 127 

sudden end, and restore the old system of things ; its 
friends said, to open before it a new era of strength, 
perhaps to bring visibly the triumphant coming of 
the Messiah, and his victorious reign * 

Various things happened just then, as always hap- 
pen at such a time, to deepen the terror, to confirm 
the hushed and eager expectation. That year the 
great Theodosius died ; and with him, says Gibbon, 
died the genius of ancient Eome. Now first the per- 
manent line of separation was drawn between the 
Eastern and Western Empire, parted between his two 
incapable sons. Within a month after his death, in 
the dead of winter, vast hordes of barbarians, no 
longer held back by the dread of his name, poured 
across the frozen Danube to threaten Italy and Greece : 
poured like a tide-wave, driven on by a great storm 
of wilder invasion behind, — in front the Goths, after 
them the terrible and hardly human Huns. 

As that low thunder began to be heard along the 
North, the spell of an unearthly horror seemed to 
seize on men's minds, Pagan and Christian alike. Six 
years before, the emperor had decreed by edict the 
overthrow of Paganism ; and at a blow, or rather by 
a hundred blows wildly struck at once throughout the 
empire, temple and altar and consecrated image and 
secret shrine went clown. The work was done by 
swarms of monks, who issued from the monasteries 
of East and West, with eager, triumphant, iconoclastic 
zeal. To quote the words of Gibbon, "In almost every 
province of the Eoman world an army of fanatics, 
without authority and without discipline, invaded the 

* See De Civitate Dei, xviii. 54. 



128 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 

peaceful inhabitants; and the ruin of the fairest 
structures of antiquity still displays the ravages of 
those barbarians, who alone had time and inclination 
to execute such laborious destruction." 

Now it was not, to either party in this wild cru- 
sade, the mere destruction of temple, grove, altar, or 
sacred image. Still less was it to them what it is to 
us, the mere destruction of Greek and Eoman art. 
To the Pagan mind the old gods were tutelar divini- 
ties of land and city : their downfall left their walls 
naked to the invader. To the Christian mind these* 
gods were Demons of awful and as yet unknown 
power. They had been worsted, so far, in the life- 
and-death struggle with a still mightier power, fer- 
vently believed to be the very presence of Almighty 
God himself. But suppose one shade of doubt as to 
this ; or suppose that in his dark decree God chose 
to leave his people for a season naked to their ene- 
mies ! Who could tell what vengeance, what terror, 
the " demons " they had fought against might yet have 
it in their power to inflict ? * 

Besides, had not they, too, been brought up to re- 
vere before all earthly things the majesty of Eome ? 
Was not that very imperial majesty itself sundered 
before their eyes ? Were not rumors of peril such as 
had not been dreamed of for near eight centuries, so 
invincible had seemed the Eternal City, even now 
echoing in their ears ? They could not look forward, 
as we from a long, safe distance can look back, to see 
how the storm should sweep over and water the earth, 
making it bring forth a more generous growth ; and 

* See De Civitate Dei, xx. 13 (compare ii. 10, x. 21). 



HIS CONVERSION. 129 

how its lightnings should strike down or scorch away, 
first of all, noxious things, that while they stayed made 
any better world impossible. They were in the gloom 
of its blackness, and the mutterings of its thunder 
were close upon them. In a few years more, Eome 
was taken and sacked by Alaric (410). The spell of 
her great name was broken. Her desolation, to use 
the language of the time, was as the desolation of 
Babylon the great, and of Mneveh, which Jehovah 
had cursed of old. In men's imagination, the fall of 
Eome seemed almost the very dissolution of the globe. 

History can only give us the incidents of the scene, 
not the passion and the terror that belong to it.* The 
record of a time is truly read in the minds of those 
living at the time : not in the events, which must be 
gathered and put together afterwards; but in the atmos- 
phere, which can alone make the picture of them real. 
This atmosphere we find, more than anywhere else, 
in the writings of Augustine ; and it is to him we 
must turn, in brief, to get such interpretation as we 
may of the thought of the time. That thought we shall 
find, for our present uses, in the three aspects under 
which his writings have now to be considered. 

I. His public life, as Bishop of Hippo in Africa, 
began in that year of panic and dread. 395, and lasted 
thirty-five years, till his death in 430. Ten years 
before, at the age of thirty-one, was his conversion, — 
an event of such note that it is commemorated in the 
Eoman calendar to this day. It may be worth while 

* All that can be gleaned from the meagre annals of the time 
•will be found in Hodgkin's " Italy and her Invaders " (Oxford, 
1880). 

6* • i 



130 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 

here to give his own tender and dramatic account of 
it. He had listened to the preaching of Ambrose, 
and had been pondering with a friend the writings of 
Paul in much agitation of mind ; and was strolling in 
the garden, when he heard a voice saying, Tolle, lege; 
tolle, lege : " Take, read ; take, read." At first he 
thought it was spoken in some children's game ; but 
suddenly it struck him that the voice must be an 
angel's. " So, checking my tears, I rose, judging it to 
be nothing else but a command to read the first words 
of the "book I should find on opening. For' I had 
heard of thy servant Antony, that coming in while 
the gospel was read he took it as a warning to him- 
self, Go sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and 
come follow me; and by that word was at once turned 
to thee. Eagerly then I returned to where my friend 
sat, where I had left the volume when I came away. 
I took it, opened it, and read silently the words my 
eye first rested on : Let us walk honestly, as in the day ; 
not in rioting and drunkenness, not in letudness and 
debauchery, not in strife and jealousy ; but put on the 
Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh 
to satisfy its lusts. I read no more, and had no need 
of more ; for instantly, at the end of this sentence, a 
calm light, as it were, entered my heart, and all the 
darkness of doubt passed away." 

Nothing is said here of any change of opinion, or 
of the solution of any intellectual doubt that may 
ever have troubled him. As far as such a thing 
could be, it was a purely moral conversion, a change 
of sentiment, emotion, and will. Eemorse for boy- 
ish faults, such as stealing a neighbor's pears, or for 



MANICREISM. 131 

loose living in his youth, made only a part of it, — 
most likely, only a small part of it. It was rather 
a recoil against the whole theory of life by which he 
had been living hitherto. Especially, it was closely 
connected, in his own mind, with that marked in- 
tellectual change which consisted in renouncing the 
Manichsean philosophy, and accepting with great in- 
tensity of conviction Paul's own doctrine of good 
and evil.* 

Just what this Manichsean opinion was, what was 
its strange fascination to the most cultivated thought 
of' that time, and what made it the great bugbear of 
true believers for a thousand years together, it is not 
easy to state to a modern mind. Augustine's own 
statement of it, as I have said before, is turbid, con- 
fused, and unintelligible. But it must have some 
meaning to us, if we could only get at it, seeing that 
it makes so large and imposing a figure in the history 
of opinion. 

Its essential principle is commonly explained as 
simple Dualism, in some such way as this. The 
Universe consists of two vast realms — infinities, we 
might call them — which are polar opposites : Light 
and Darkness. Where they come in contact, there is 
interminable strife. The darkness aspires to the light, 
hungers for it, engulfs, or (it is Augustine's word) de- 
vours a portion of it ; and from their contact is pro- 
duced the visible world, including the nature of man. 

* " In turmoil of mind (cestuans) I asked, Whence is Evil? What 
were the agonies of my laboring heart ! what groans, my God ! 
And there were thine ears, when I knew it not. And when in si- 
lence I made bold to ask, loud was the cry appealing to thy mercy, 
dumb the anguish of my soul." — Con/., vii. 7. 



132 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 

In him, again, the soul represents (or is born of) light, 
and the body darkness. So man is the subject of a 
divided empire ; and the conflict, for all we see, must 
be eternal. 

Now this may pass very well for a sort of poetry, 
telling in symbols the story of that strife which we 
see going on in the world about us, and are conscious 
of, more or less, within us. But it is not easy to see 
why Augustine should have hated it so, when once 
he had left it behind ; why the Church should have 
feared it so, that the first blood shed for heresy* and 
the most ferocious of Crusades,! should have been on 
the charge of this deadly misbelief. At first sight it 
does not seem so very different from Paul's own doc- 
trine of the war of flesh and spirit ; it looks like 
quite the same thing, in other terminology, with the 
Church doctrine of Satan as the adversary of God, 
which was, in fact, derived from the same Oriental 
source. For the Persian Mani — who had been 
seized and flayed alive (according to the common 
story) a hundred years before by the king of Persia 
— had only set in more exaggerated and poetic strain 
the old Zoroastrian scheme of Good and Evil, en- 
grafting on it some wild mythology of creation, and a 
scheme of redemption, which is only a strange phan- 
tasmagory, coupled with some Gnostic tradition of a 
Clirist.J I do not know how, seen merely from the 
outside, we could easily tell the difference between 

* Of the Priscillianists in Spain, a. d. 385. 

t That against the Albigenses, 1208-1229. 

$ The completest statement of the Manichaean doctrine that I 
have seen is in Mosheim's " Commentaries " on the First Three 
Centuries. 



EVIL PHYSICAL OR MORAL. 133 

Augustine's earlier and later theoretic view, as touch- 
ing the conflict of good and evil in human nature. 

We must look at it, therefore, in another way, from 
the point of view of religious experience. According 
to the Manichsean view, the source of Evil is physi- 
cal ; it exists in the nature of things. Man is subject 
to it because he is part of the system of things. The 
conflict is fought out, as it were, by vast impersonal 
forces, which he can have no hand in guiding. And 
so the system becomes one of Fatalism, — fatalism of 
that most hopeless and unrelenting sort which makes 
a man's soul (as it were) a mere shifting focus, where 
the rays of light and darkness meet, and his destiny 
is the plaything of their caprice. In other words, 
its view is speculative and physical, not ethical. It 
is of the conflict of Light and Darkness simply, not 
of Eight and Wrong. "I had rather," says Augustine, 
of his own Manichsean days, " that thine unchanging 
Substance erred of necessity, than my own inconstant 
nature by will ; and that Sin befell by immutable 
law from heaven, that so man should be free of its 
guilt, while in proud corruption of flesh and blood." 

And thus the modern counterpart of Manichaeism 
— if we would understand it from the corresponding 
thing in our own experience — is to be found in that 
scientific fatalism which is one of the threatening 
forms of modern thought, which we are well used to 
in the speculations of certain pessimists and evolu- 
tionists. I am anxious not to add to the rancor of 
any prejudice that may happen to exist. Evolution 
is the accepted dominant philosophy of the day. I 
accept it too, so far as I am entitled to exercise 



134 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 

private judgment on so large a matter; desiring in 
all humility to know whatever there, is true in it, 
and seeming to find in it the explanation of more 
dark facts in life than is found in any other system. 
But the instant it takes the form of fatalism as to 
the good or ill in human character, of helpless scep- 
ticism as to the course of human destiny, or despair 
of social progress, I surmise that there is something 
wrong, and that man's mind is capable of something- 
better. 

The insidious temptation to that way of thinking 
we ought to be aware of in ourselves, i£ we would 
judge the thought of Augustine and his contempora- 
ries. We should see it not historically alone, as it 
touched them, but in thoughts, images, and influ- 
ences that reach us too. The gloomy imagination 
of Shelley was strangely impressed by watching an 
Alpine glacier that seemed " crawling " from its bleak 
lair to swallow, like some monstrous dragon, the fer- 
tile valley and the smiling life below ; and he thought 
of it as a symbol of the Fate which irresistibly over- 
rides and crushes human hope. 

Astronomers tell us the day is coming when all 
this globe will be blasted, empty, frozen, incapable 
of life ; and to some this suggests a certain chilling 
despair as to the value and end of human effort. To 
others again it seems, after all these ages of costly 
and toilsome progress, as if civilization itself were 
going to be the prey of those appalling wars that 
have followed one another like thunder-shocks in 
these last five and twenty years, and still threaten ; 
or of the vices and miseries that like a cancer eat 



NATURE OF THE CONFLICT. 135 

at its very heart. And, if a serious and devout 
thinker, like Carlyle or Euskin, can be tempted 
now to this intellectual despair, how was it in that 
day, when the one only fabric of society, polity, and 
art men knew seemed crumbling on one hand from 
interior decay, and threatened on the other by the 
irresistible avalanche of savage hordes ? The wild 
strange heresy of the Manichees was as it were the 
echo in their soul of that knell of doom which seemed 
clanging from all things around, in the downfall of a 
perishing world. 

'Now it is not the warped judgment of a church- 
man; it is the judgment of Comte in his masterly 
outline of mediaeval history, it is the judgment of that 
cool positivist, John Morley, in his apologetic essay 
on Voltaire, that civilization was narrowly saved, at 
this crisis of its fate, by the organized, valiant, ag- 
gressive faith of Christendom. How its conflict was 
carried on, and how its victory was gained, belongs to 
the study of the next four centuries, ending with the 
Christian Empire of Charlemagne. Just now, we are 
standing at the moment of time which determined 
what the nature of that struggle should be. And this 
decision was precisely contained in the nature of that 
change which passed upon the mind of Augustine in 
the hour of his conversion. 

It is hardly too much to say that that revolt of 
his moral nature against the doctrine of the Mani- 
chees had in it the germ and the key of that great 
spiritual evolution. For the very point of it was that 
it shifted the ground of conflict. The source of Evil, 
it showed him, is not in the physical world ; it is in 



136 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 

the moral world. The battle-ground is not the nature 
of things ; it is the nature of man. The conflict of 
good and evil is to be fought out in the soul. It is 
not as if man's salvation were staked on some great 
game j)layed by invisible combatants in the wide field 
of the universe, — a game in which he has no hand 
and cannot see the moves. It is narrowed down to 
the field of his own mind; and, whatever outside 
forces are engaged in it, they are first of all, so to 
speak, personified in his own reason, conscience, pas- 
sion, and will. Just where and just because "he is 
most intensely conscious of his own personality, there 
and therefore comes the great alternative of right or 
wrong, of life or death. 

Now it is in the very conviction of sin itself that 
one first has the true idea of good ; just as it is when 
we would do good (as Paul says) that evil is present 
too. For the two are counterparts ; so that not only 
we cannot know one without the other, but we cannot 
know either of them in any other way than through 
that struggle against the other. Nay, more. We 
cannot really know anything about God, of any con- 
sequence for us to know, except as the power within 
us "that makes for righteousness" in the struggle; 
that " works in us both to will and to do." The phys- 
ical nature and conditions (so to speak) of Infinite 
Good — what we call the Divine Attributes — are as 
impossible for us to define as those of Infinite Evil. 
And so in the very struggle itself we have an assur- 
ance, the only assurance we can have, that the great 
spiritual forces of the Universe itself are on our 
side ; in short, that our salvation (which means our 



THE PELAGIAN CONTROVERSY. 137 

" safety " in it) is the direct gift of Almighty God 
himself. 

This we may take to be the real sense of the 
Pauline or Augustinian doctrine of justification by 
faith, as seen in the light of personal experience, and 
especially as against the Manichsean heresy. Au- 
gustine stakes his position in that controversy on the 
point of moral freedom. To him it is a shocking 
thing to say that anything is originally and essentially 
evil* Evil is a corruption of some native good ; a 
ruin, a fall, not a destiny from the beginning. To 
attain the higher life is not a conquest of something 
alien ; it is winning back our birthright. This con- 
viction lay at the heart of Augustine's creed. To con- 
ceive it, further, as a force in history, we must think 
of it not as a mere form of philosophic speculation 
with him, but as a vivid, intense, fiery conviction, 
such as he conceived it in the moment of conversion, 
and such as, in the heated warfare of opinion, he has 
stamped the impression of it on the Christian mind. 

II. I have dwelt thus out of seeming proportion 
on Augustine's relation to the Manichsean controversy, 
both because it is the most obscure in itself, and be- 
cause it gives the exact point of view from which to 
consider the two other chief intellectual tasks of his 
life. Of these the first was his controversy with Pe- 
lagius, — the great unending debate of Destiny and 
Moral Freedom. 

In one sense this controversy is impotent and futile, 
turning on a question that necessarily remains un- 
solved and unsolvable, the shuttlecock of metaphysics 

* See the " Dialogue with Faustus." 



138 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 

since thought began. At whatever point we start, — 
divine foreknowledge, destiny, natural law, evolution, 
— strict logic brings us straight to one or another 
form of necessity. Regarded scientifically, moral lib- 
erty is not even thinkable. On the other hand, no 
sooner do we come to the facts of life, — action, con- 
duct, the judgment of motives, responsibility for re- 
sults, personal appeal, — than we take for granted at 
every step that moral freedom which our theory de- 
nies. Accept whatever theory you will of antecedent 
and result, with its logical consequences, and' you 
are a fatalist at once, helpless sport of destiny. Try 
to state to yourself any theory you will of human 
action, and apply it to men's character and conduct, 
the instant you say I will or / ought, you have come 
upon other ground. You have admitted in terms that 
fact of human life which is all your opponent really 
contends for, however irreconcilable to your own his 
way of stating it. Life incessantly re-creates the faith 
which science as incessantly denies. 

All this is very simple and elementary business. 
Leaving now the platitudes of metaphysics, let us at- 
tempt to see the great debate as it enters here upon 
the field of history. It is very interesting to watch 
the combatants : Augustine, with the hot blood of his 
native Barbary coast, a small, thin man, nervous, 
fiery, intense, goaded by memories of his own sins of 
the blood, haunted by the thought of a Hand that had 
been held out to snatch him from destruction, humbly 
sensitive of his own helplessness in that crisis, and 
clinging like Paul to the thought of a Divine Power 
he must always lean on for strength, himself only the 



AUGUSTINE AXD PELAGIUS. 139 

meanest instrument of an Almighty Will ; Pelagius, 
with the clear, cool head of his native Britain, large of 
frame, slow of speech, grave, honest, weighty, his self- 
mastery trained by strife of wind and ocean-wave, of 
film, resolute will, clear conscience, cheerful courage, 
and masculine understanding.* The two had kind 
thoughts and respect for one another, for they had 
met in personal debate ; f but the controversy their 
names represent lay as much in their radical differ- 
ence of temperament as in the difference of theory 
they started with. 

It is of no use now to take up their arguments. As 
it must always be in the field of action, vehement 
conviction had the better of sober common-sense, and 
Pelagius went back to the calmer life of his native 
North. Was that a thing to regret ? At least it was 

O CD 

inevitable. The men who make the deepest mark on 
history are the men who feel with a deep and intense 
conviction that they are instruments of a higher 
Power, their own will governed by a vast Force 
behind them, impersonal and uncontrollable. This 
seems to be the case even in direct ratio to their 
weight of personality and vehemence of resolution : 
with Paul, Augustine, Luther; with William of 
Orange, Cromwell, Napoleon, — the men of God, or 
else the men of Destiny. 

And perhaps it was better so. Here I will quote 
the historian Michelet. " To reduce Christianity," he 
says, " to a mere philosophy, were to strike it with 

* To complete the parallel, later belief added that the two great 
antagonists were born in the same year. 

t See Augustine's letter to Pelagius (Ep. 146). 



140 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 

death, and to rob it of the future. "What would the 
dry rationalism of the Pelagians have availed when 
the German invasion came ? Not that proud theory 
of liberty needed then to be preached to the conquer- 
ors of the Empire, but the dependence of man, the 
almightiness of God. To temper that fierce bar- 
barism, all the religious and poetic fervor of Chris- 
tianity was none too intense. The Roman world felt 
by instinct that it must seek its own refuge in the 
ample bosom of Eeligion. That was its hope, its 
only asylum, when the Empire that had called itself 
eternal was passing away in its turn, with the nations 
it had subdued. . . . The mystic doctrine triumphed. 
As the barbarians came, the controversy ceased ; the 
schools were closed and still. It was faith, simplicity, 
patience, the w T orld needed then." 

The partisan applause of Augustine because his 
doctrine triumphed, and the theological odium into 
which his opponent fell, are both alike discreditable 
to the occasion and the man. But — as afterwards 
in the sharp warfare in which the Protestant Refor- 
mation was plunged — it was a time of crisis and 
peril. At such a time men must look well to the 
keenness of their weapons, and not spare blows in 
the thick of the fight. It was well that that doctrine 
triumphed which was likeliest to enlist men's pas- 
sions on the side of religion and virtue. But Augus- 
tine, any more than Calvin, cannot claim our full 
verdict for all his acts. Of the two the first had 
far the more generous, the tenderer, the broader 
nature ; and of the two his theological scheme 
more thoroughly and deeply made part of his own 



THE CITY OF GOD. 141 

religious experience. He felt that, in a sense, every- 
thing was at stake in the debate ; and this is his 
claim for pardon, that his vehemence in controversy 
stirred up hate against his opponents, and they even 
charged him with using the arm of the law against 
them, and exciting the persecution under which they 
suffered. At least, the moderate and gentle temper 
he began with gave way, and his name is unhappily 
used to justify the vindictive, unreasoning malice that 
has spurred on the hunting of heresy to this day. 

III. Of the very great bulk of Augustine's writings 
the largest part consists of exhortations, discussions, 
expositions, that filled up the spaces of his routine 
work during his five and thirty years of office. One 
famous treatise stands out in strong relief from the 
mass ; and for breadth of mind, largeness of view, 
orderliness of argument, or mastery of style, his fame 
rests chiefly on this, — " The City of God." 

The book abounds in arguments that would seem 
childish now. Its notion of sacred history is formal, 
uncritical, and dogmatic. Its sketch of early events 
is at once tediously minute and curiously incomplete. 
Its reasoning on natural things shows all the igno- 
rance and incompetency of an unscientific age. Its 
expositions of Scripture are impossible to accept, its 
personal testimonies of miracles and wonders impos- 
sible to believe.* In other w r ords, it has just the 
intellectual defects, the bigotries, ignorances, and 
superstitions, of the human mind at that day. 

But it is not necessary to dwell on these. They 

* See in particular the very curious and detailed account of 
these miracles in Book xxii., chap. 8. 



142 SAINT AUGUSTINE. 

are faults on the surface, sometimes running down 
into the substance, of a great and noble work, — the 
one really great work that the human mind produced, 
we may say, for four or five centuries, at least within 
the limits of the Western Empire. Its substance I 
cannot dwell on ; of its temper and occasion a few 
words remain now to be said. 

The title of the book shows the splendid concep- 
tion that lay in the mind of Augustine, — a concep- 
tion which we may call the final culminating and 
idealizing of the old Messianic hope. It set up, as it 
were, a magnificent standard of faith, right on the 
spot and at the time that must see the great battle 
of Christ and Antichrist fought out. 

The time of its composition was between the 
fall of Rome under Alaric the Goth and the more 
furious invasion of the Vandal Genseric. At that 
moment of chief horror and despair, when the brav- 
est were appalled at a disaster that so appealed to 
men's imagination, when even believers began to ask 
whether Christianity had not proved impotent to the 
task of holding the defences Paganism had main- 
tained so long,* Augustine threw down this sublime 
challenge to their faith. 

His tone is proud, confident, uncompromising, 
triumphant in advance. It is attack, and not de- 
fence. He puts point-blank the contrast of the " Two 
Cities " as he calls them : the City of this World, the 
abode of superstition, cruelty, violence, conquest, lust, 
greediness, hate, — all illustrated in the record of 
pagan Eome ; the City of God, with its marvellous 
* See the Introduction, and compare Book xx., chap. 13. 



THE IDEAL STATE. 143 

chronicle of prophecy and miracle, the saints and 
heroes of its glorious calendar, its constant assurance 
and proof of superhuman aid, its magnificent promise 
of future ages that shall be its own, illustrated from 
the sacred records of Hebrew faith. The two are 
elaborately contrasted in their origin, their progress, 
and their end, in the second and larger division of the 
work ; the former part having already shown, in even 
superfluous detail, how helpless Paganism had been 
to secure blessing and safety to its adherents in this 
world, and how empty was its promise for the world 
to come. 

The phrase itself City of God carries a suggestion 
of the compact, highly organized municipalities of 
Italy or Greece, and their capacity to call out and 
sustain the most strenuous and devoted patriotism. 
The ancient City stood for natural justice, armed and 
codified, for a common welfare, and for protection 
against assault. Its justice, perhaps, was class-priv- 
ilege. For liberty it had only "liberties." But it 
was at once the highest political conception men knew 
then, the most sacred and revered type of authority 
they could comprehend. And, in making it the key 
to his argument, Augustine has given, as it were, 
the Eoman counterpart of that " Kingdom of Heaven " 
w]iich the Jews looked for in their Messiah's reign. 

He offers, however, no such promise of a kingdom 
upon earth. This "kingdom of heaven is within." 
The " City " is purely ideal, spiritual, heavenly. The 
miseries of the good and bad, so far as human eye can 
see, will continue alike and equal through the pres- 
ent life to the end of time ; the visible separation 



144 



SAINT AUGUSTINE. 



will be hereafter. The blessedness of the righteous 
on earth is peace ; the wretchedness of hell itself is 
interior conflict, even if there were no everlasting 
flame.* In this fundamental thought of the "City 
of God" we have, again, the complement of that 
thought illustrated in Augustine's reaction against 
Manichseism, which shifts the conflict of good and 
evil to the world within, and stakes all in life that 
is worth living for on the soul itself. This point of 
contrast with Manichseism is urged in several places 
in the " City of God." The blessing promised to good 
men is not that they escape the anguish or the terror, 
but that they are victorious over it. 

If we can look back now a few years, to the time 
of our own great national struggle, to those seasons 
of disaster and defeat when to large numbers, brave 
and fearful alike, the struggle itself seemed bootless 
and hopeless ; and if we can remember the enormous 
advantage then of our faith in an ideal Eepublic, 
one and indissoluble, — that sublime ideal of political 
justice and popular right which made the nation's 
victory and strength ; then, I think, we may conceive 
something of what it was, as the world plunged into 
those long dark ages of barbarism and strife, to have 
that one flag kept proudly flying above that one im- 
pregnable fortress of the City of God ! 

The ages that followed, when the Church was at 
length victorious in its new empire, do not fulfil the 
promise of that grand dream, any more than our new 

* See the exquisite chapters, Book xix., ch. 13, 14 ; also the 
brief but profound one, xix. 28 ; together with the noble and 
sweet cadence with which the work concludes. 



THE CITY OF GOD. 145 

Eepublic fulfils the hope of those who fought to save 
it, and gave their lives freely in that hope. But we 
can see at least that one great danger is past. We 
know now better than we knew then the evil and 
fatal nature of that which threatened the national 
life. So it was when men could look back after- 
wards, and see the strong lines in which Augustine 
had traced the contrast between two orders of society. 
And, in the appalling miseries and divisions that tor- 
mented the world for several centuries, it is not likely 
that one brave man, or one frightened woman, ever 
once looked back regretfully for the protection that 
could have been given by an Empire which had so 
proved itself abominable and accursed. 



VII. 

LEO THE GREAT. 

TO deal intelligently with an epoch like that of 
Leo the Great (440-461), it is especially necessary 
to bear in mind the aggressive, militant, antagonistic 
position of the Church in human history. Our the- 
ory of Christianity may be a theory of development ; 
but the facts we have to deal with are the incidents 
of a long, obstinate, often deadly struggle. That 
struggle takes mainly three directions, — against Pa- 
ganism, against Barbarism, and against corruptions 
engendered in the Church itself. At present, we are 
concerned only with the first. 

Now, to make any conflict effective, the first con- 
dition of all is that the force shall be a disciplined 
force, and shall act with absolute singleness of pur- 
pose, in absolute obedience to a single wilL The 
smooth theories of a time of peace will not suit a 
period of war. Christianity as " free religion " would 
have perished in a single generation. If we consent 
to see that it was in any sense at that time a saving 
power in the world ; if it was, in fact, the genius and 
spirit that carried society without wreck through 
many generations of confusion and disaster, — we 
shall be content to see the conditions on which that 



THE PAGAN REACTION. 147 

work could be done then. And of these the first of 
all was that the Christian Church should be united, 
organized, loyal, absolutely confident of itself, and 
thoroughly understanding the work it had to do. 

Now, if we only remember that the last great bat- 
tle fought by Eome — that in which, with Goths for 
allies, she succeeded in crippling the army of the 
Huns, in a fight that cost, it is said, three hundred 
thousand lives — was in the year 451 ; that the next 
year the hordes of Attila, with recovered strength, 
hovered like a flight of vultures above the plains of 
Italy ; that three years later Genseric with his Van- 
dals swept Eome almost clean of its vast treasures of 
gold, silver, and bronze, and precious works of art ; 
that these things happened in the very middle of 
Leo's rule, while, within twenty-five years after his 
death, the spectral sovereignty of Eome itself came 
to an end, and the barbarian was lord of the Western 
Empire, — we shall see distinctly that we have come 
to the death-agony of the ancient State. And, as this 
great agony was coming on, the East was racked and 
vexed by the bitterest of theological debates, only sus- 
pended at Chalcedon in 451 ; while in the West, and 
at Alexandria, the intellectual centre of the empire, 
there was a revival of classic Paganism which threat- 
ened the very life of Christianity itself. 

I cannot speak at length of the causes, only men- 
tion some of the symptoms, of the extraordinary pagan 
revival which followed for a generation or two the 
edict of Theodosius closing the temples, and forbid- 
ding the public worship of the gods. The last pagan 
writer of vigorous Latin prose, Ammianus, ends his 



148 LEO THE GREAT. 

story with a vivid account of the desperate battle 
about Adrianople (378), in which the Goths broke 
once and for all the spell of the Eoman name. Three 
years later, Paganism was nominally abolished by im- 
perial edict. But five and twenty years after that, 
while Alaric was training his Goths in Italy, Clau- 
dian could celebrate alike, with easy courtliness, in 
purely pagan fashion, the exploits of the brave Stili- 
cho, and the holidays of Honorius who murdered him, 
or recite in smooth epigram the miracles and mys- 
teries of the Christian record ; while at Alexandria 
Hypatia lent the charm of her beauty and eloquence 
to the new Platonism that glorified the old gods of 
Greece with transcendental finery, till she was torn 
to pieces by a mob of monks (415). 

The pagan games, with circumstances of barbarity 
and horror of which I shall have more to say at an- 
other time, were still celebrated in circus and amphi- 
theatre. A certain insolent fashion of ignoring the 
new creed, with the growing power built upon it, had 
taken hold of the popular mind, and was still domi- 
nant in literature and art. And, for the last strange 
proof how vital and tough were the roots of old su- 
perstition, when Alaric appeared before the gates of 
Eome, Etruscan soothsayers were sent for, to see if by 
their incantations they could yet save the city ; and 
promised that they would do it, (we are told,) but at 
the cost of human sacrifice, and of rites so horrid that 
the people refused them at the hour of their greatest 
terror. Even Pope Innocent the First, then in Eome, 
had consented, it is said, that this last appeal to the 
pagan magic should be made. 



SURVIVAL OF THE PAGAN SPIRIT. 149 

Now, at the time of this siege, the Empire had "been 
nominally Christian for about a hundred years. How 
long the spirit and belief of Paganism remained after 
this, it is of course impossible to say. The last great 
work of Augustine's life was to argue in his " City of 
God " against this very reaction, when it seemed as 
if the new religion had failed to hold the ground con- 
quered under the ancient gods of Eome. What he so 
argued against was but a helpless and despairing cry. 
The old wreck, swarming as it was. with many evil 
forms of life, was soon swept disastrously away. As a 
clear-eyed man like Leo could see, even then, there 
was only one power that could take its place. 

To the common eye the struggle might look doubt- 
ful, even yet. Paganism had lost its hold on men's 
reason. On their conscience it never had any very 
firm hold at all. But it held strong grasp on two 
great springs of human action, their imagination and v 
their fear. We have just seen to what acts the terror 
of the siege had nearly led. And, for the imagina- 
tion, it had taken full possession of the forms of liter- ) 
ature and art. Except for a few rude hymns feeling 
their way to the common heart in a simple popular 
rhythm, except for a few rude shapes and symbols 
of Christian imagery, there was nothing to fill the 
great void left by the perishing of ancient art. For 
centuries yet, Christian poets clung helplessly, as 
it were, to 

" The fair humanities of old religion, 
The power, the beauty, and the majesty 
That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain, 
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring, 
Or chasms and watery depths." 



150 



LEO THE GREAT. 



After seven centuries of implacable monastic rule, 
Dante has still a half-belief in Charon and Pluto; 
and when the revival of letters came, a little later, 
the old deities sprang, as it were, from the soil of the 
new culture, and nourished in a sort of pallid life 
down almost to our day. But that life had run in 
all the veins of the ancient world, where each state 
had its own divinity, and every formal act was a re- 
ligious symbol; where the head of the State was a 
god visible in the flesh, and the very places of public 
amusement were temples of Mars and Venus, the 
divinities of violence and lust. So that it was still, 
in the middle of the fifth century, a hand-to-hand 
struggle in which the Church was engaged, if not 
with Paganism itself, in its cruel older forms, at 
least with those compromises of its spirit found 
under the names of Priscillianist and Manichsean, 
against which Leo waged an unsleeping and un- 
tiring war. 

Again, we must look from his point of view, not 
ours, at the controversies that divided and disgraced 
the Christians of the East. It was not controversy 
between the friends and opponents of the orthodox 
belief. Each party eagerly and honestly claimed his 
own to be the true exposition of the Mcene faith. 
Thus Apollinaris, fervently maintaining the doctrine 
of his friend Athanasius, who had sojourned with him 
in some of his travels, fell into the heresy that Christ's 
body was of heavenly, and not of human substance. 
Macedonius, taking the creed too literally in its lim- 
itation as well as its assertion, was charged with sub- 
ordinating the Spirit to the Father and the Son; to 



NESTORIUS AND EUTYCHES. 151 

meet which the Council at Constantinople expanded 
that clause a little (in 381). Nestorius, holding 
strongly to Christ's human nature, saw blasphemy in 
the phrase " Mother of God " applied to Mary ; saying 
that Jesus was divine not intrinsically, but was made 
so by the indwelling Deity.* And in the storm of 
controversy that burst out on this, hardly stayed by 
the decree at Ephesus (431), Eutyches, an Alexan- 
drian monk of seventy, went so far, in his hot ortho- 
doxy, as to say that the divine nature in him quite 
absorbed the human. 

v To us these disputes are battles in the thinnest of 
air ; but then they were matters very literally of life 
and death. Nestorius, who had himself been a hard, 
high-handed ecclesiastic, was banished to the confines 
of Persia, where living a long life of exile he left a 
sect that bears his name down to our day. The party 
of Eutyches took violent possession of the synod at 
Ephesus (449), the "robber-synod," where they car- 
ried their point not by acclamation only, but by blows ; 
so that their chief opponent was literally beaten and 
trampled to death, and the Roman delegates sent by 
Leo to maintain the primacy of Eome barely fled with 
their lives. 

Such was the state of things, so far as touched his 
own immediate work, with which Leo had to deal. 
It presents two sides of a conflict which w T e find in- 
cessantly present in his writings. Now Leo was not, 

* The terms by which he signified the operation of the Divine 
nature in him were "indwelling" (ivoii<ri<ris), " assumption" or 
" adoption " (avd\r)\pis), " in working " (ivepyeia), " inhumanizing " 
(ivavOpwTrrjais), i. e. abiding in humanity. 



152 



LEO THE GREAT. 



in any sort, a pietist, a sentimentalist, a recluse. He 
was first of all a Eoman statesman, with the clear 
sagacity, the resolute will, the firm and inexorable 
temper when a point must be carried, the wary vigi- 
lance, the unswerving persistency, that had made the 
Eomans masters of the world. He had this advan- 
tage over them, besides, that his policy dealt with con- 
victions, not with armies and state powers, so that 
his clear intelligence had free range to act, moving 
in the intangible region of ideas, where no friction 
is ; while he was in full command of the intellectual 
sympathies and the moral conviction which are al- 
ways the deepest moving forces of the time. One 
does not read a page of his writings without seeing 
how complete his convictions is, and how perfect his 
command of those springs of power. 

Then he was a man of absolute courage, — not sim- 
ply that easy "courage of his convictions" which 
enables or compels one who has any strong convic- 
tion at all to give it expression somehow without dis- 
guise, but that personal physical courage as well, which 
with a man dealing in theories and policies is much 
more rare. This absolute courage it was which made 
him meet without blenching, squarely as an equal, 
the terrible Attila, when sent to intercede with him 
for the trembling inhabitants of Eome, and, by what 
seemed then a miracle, but was indeed only the mir- 
acle of mind over brute force, won from him the 
terms by which he left Italy unharmed ; then, two 
years later, gained from the relentless Genseric such 
conditions as still left security of life, when the city 
for the second time was at the mercy of the barba- 



THE DELIVERER OF ROME. 153 

rian. Perfect courage joined with dignity of office 
never, perhaps, won a nobler victory. I copy here the 
words of no eulogist, but of a clear and somewhat 
severe critic of the growth of papal power. 

" The emperor, the court, the wealthy, and the noble 
had fled at the approach of danger ; the intrepid Bishop, 
strong in faith and hope and love, alone remained at the 
post of honor and of peril ; and, when the satiated foe 
had retired and left the city emptied of all its wealth 
and substance, and almost reduced to a wilderness of 
deserted habitations, there remained none to advise or 
to cheer the famishing remnant but the undaunted 
Bishop and his gallant clergy. These had never quitted 
their posts ; these had faced the foe, and averted the 
extreruhy of ruin ; and their example alone kept alive 
the spark of life among the despairing multitude that 
still clung to their desolate homes. It is in this spon- 
taneous chieftainship that we recognize one of the most 
effective elements of the subsequent political greatness 
of the Roman bishops. The decaying mass of civil in- 
stitutions became as manure at the root of the papacy. 
Papal Rome drew nourishment from dissolution, courage 
from despair. In desperate emergencies like that we 
have just adverted to, no one will look into or scrutinize 
too closely the claims and titles of the deliverer ; in 
such times the duties of civil and spiritual government 
are thrust into the hands best able to execute them ; 
both duties are impelled into the same channel, and 
flow on naturally and amicably together. To Leo it was 
due that Rome was not converted into a heap of smoul- 
dering ashes ; and, if natural justice were to decide the 
question between the Church and the State, without 
doubt the Pope was the rightful governor of Rome, 
7* 



154 LEO THE GEEAT. 

for without him there would have beeu no Rome to 
govern." * 

It is a mark of the real greatness of Leo, that these 
striking and dramatic events do not appear to have 
even ruffled the surface of his mind. They are mere 
incidents in the discharge of his duty, perhaps dis- 
tractions from what he felt to be his true work. It is 
a mark of his wisdom, too. In his judgment of the 
relative importance of things, he was wiser in his own 
day than we should probably be in our judgment 
now. It was of more moment to the world, just as it 
was of more account to him, that the invisible foun- 
dation should be made sure, than that this or that 
should be the working-out of any political event. 

The work to be done was to build up a new Eome 
on the ruins of the old. And, for this new structure, 
his one task was to care for the foundations. These 
were laid in men's loyalty and belief and hope, and 
must be constructed patiently alike in the storm or 
calm of outward events. You look through his en- 
tire correspondence, page by page ; and you find not 
an allusion to events that even at this distance shed 
such a powerful and lurid glare on the history of the 
time. On the other hand, his letters f are full of the 
official detail of his work as spiritual Head of the 
Christian world, which he fully believed himself to 
be. On this one point there is never a word of con- 
cession, never an instant of hesitation. We have no 
business, just now, with his arguments, only with his 
convictions. Whether Peter was chief of the apostles 

* Greenwood's Cathedra Petri, Vol. I. pp. 426, 467. 

t Of which about one hundred and eighty are preserved. 






HIS ECCLESIASTICAL THEORY. 155 

in any official sense ; whether he ever came to Eome 
and lived as bishop of the church there ; whether his 
primacy, if he had it, descended to his successors, — 
all these questions, of fruitful controversy once, are 
nothing to the point. What we see is, that the 
Church at Eome — partly by its metropolitan rank, 
partly by the transfer of the court to Constantinople, 
partly by the distractions of Italy, partly by the 
steadily aggressive policy of its abler heads — had 
come to have a dignity and authority that gradually 
supplanted those of every other ; and that, in the 
great ruin that had overtaken the Eoman state, men 
came to lean more on its visible and compacted 
strength. We also see, or seem to see, that this 
power, so disciplined and firm, was the one thing 
capable of saving to the world its old treasures of 
thought and its traditions of social order. What is 
now our best judgment of the time was then its in- 
spiration and its faith, and gave it courage to abide 
the bursting of the storm that was close upon it. 

The strong heart of Leo held absolutely to that 
conviction, whether as statesman or as Christian 
believer is of little concern to us. In his singleness 
of purpose, he probably could not have drawn any 
nice line between his policy and his creed. His argu- 
ments will not count for much with us. It is hardly 
too much to say that he does not stoop to argument. 
His tone is of assertion, instruction, authority, com- 
mand. Several of his letters are treatises of some 
length on disputed points : the famous one to Fla- 
vian, which guided the decisions of the Council at 
Chalcedon (451), would make a pamphlet of about 



156 LEO THE GEE AT. 

twenty pages. Nowhere in any of them does he hint 
that an opponent is to be met as an equal, on the fair 
level of debate. The assumed grounds of his opinion 
he is willing to explain ; but the opinion itself you 
must take, whether you accept the argument or not. 

In that particular debate, Eutyches had appealed 
to Leo, and had gained at first his cordial support. 
But when the, point came to be better known, above 
all, when the robber-synod at Ephesus showed in 
what a temper it was held, then Leo was perfectly 
uncompromising and distinct. He demanded at first 
that the Council should be held in Italy ; and, when 
that could not be had, wrote his letter of instructions, 
taking at once the tone not of debater but of judge. 
His dictum has been the test phrase of orthodoxy 
ever since : that both natures, divine and human, 
were blended, in their completeness, in the one Per- 
son who was thus perfect God and perfect man ; 
and his little treatise, in this letter, is to this day as 
authentic and clear a statement as has been made, or 
perhaps can be made, of what, by the very terms of 
it, is absolute and unintelligible mystery. * We may 
think as we will of the proposition. We may find in 
it, if we will, an important metaphysical truth, where 
we fail to see a dogmatic one. But at least we may 
recognize its value as a symbol, or watchword, in the 
crisis that was fast coming on. It is interesting to 
remember that the decision at Chalcedon was in the 

* Its terms are, Salvd igitur proprietate utriusque naturae, [et sub- 
stantia], et in unam coeunte personam (in the Greek, els tv irp6<rwirov 
<rvviovo-ns). — 'Leo L, Ep. xxviii. This is (I think) the first use 
of the term irpSo-wirov, corresponding to the Latin persona, and is 
apparently a concession to Leo's influence and authority. 



THE DESTINY OF EOME. 157 

very year of the great battle of Chalons,* which 
broke the power of the Huns, and saved Europe from 
the fate of Asia ; and that, of these two events, Leo, 
the greatest man of the time, seems utterly and 
calmly careless of the one, while his whole heart is 
full, and all his passion roused, by the subtile point 
of transcendental theology determined in the other. 

The permanent and real work of Leo's life was to 
found a new Eome on the ruins of the old. At this 
distance of time, it is easy for us to see how far 
greater was the splendor, and vaster the sway, of the 
spiritual empire that followed him, than of the politi- 
cal dominion that went before. But, in that age of 
ruin, it is very striking to see how distinctly it was 
already prefigured to his mind. We must assume 
that he, as a native Koman, had in his heart all the 
proud and passionate loyalty which for so many ages 
had made Eome's unbroken faith in her imperial 
destiny. And perhaps it was in part the obstinate 
resolve that that faith should not be defeated, which 
made him so clear-eyed as to the coming glories of 
the Eternal City. It is best to hear his expression of 
it in his own words, which I copy from a sermon 
delivered on the memorial day of St. Peter and St. 
Paul. 

"These are the men, O Rome, -through whom the 
gospel of Christ hath shone upon thee. These are thy 
holy fathers and thy true shepherds, who have set thee 
in heavenly kingdoms far more gloriously than those 
who laid the first foundations of thy walls. These are 

* Or rather, of Troyes, some fifty miles farther south. See 
Hodgkin's " Italy and her Invaders," Vol. II. p. 138. 



158 



LEO THE GREAT. 



they who have advanced thee to such glory that, as a 
holy nation, a chosen people, a priestly and royal state, 
thou shouldst hold a broader sway in faith of God than 
in dominion of the earth. Whatever the victories that 
have borne forward thy right of empire by land and sea, 
yet less the toil of war has yielded thee than the peace 
of Christ. For the good, just, and almighty God, who 
never denied his mercy to human kind, and always, by 
his abundant benefits, has instructed all men in the 
knowledge of himself, by a more secret counsel and a 
deeper love took pity on the willing blindness of wan- 
derers and their proneness to evil, by sending his Word, 
equal and co- eternal with himself. And, that the fruit 
of this unspeakable grace might be shed through all the 
earth, he with divine foresight prepared the Eoman 
realm, whose growth was carried to limits that bor- 
dered upon the universe of all nations on every side. 
But this city, knowing not the Author of her greatness, 
while queen of almost every nation, was slave to the 
errors of every people, and seemed to herself to have 
attained great faith, because she had spurned no false- 
hood. And so, the more strictly she was held in bonds 
by Satan, so much the more marvellously she is set free 
by Christ." 

• These words we read, not as the complacent homily 
by which it is so easy to glorify a victory already 
won, but as the strong faith that is itself the pledge 
of victory in advance. It was in part an educated 
belief with Leo, and in part the clear pointing of the 
time. No blame to him, if it was also in part his 
secular and patriotic creed. To a Eoman it was the 
right thing that Borne should be 'sovereign of the 
earth. To a pious and strong-hearted Eoman of that 



HIS POLICY. 159 

age, the one thing needful at once and possible was, 
that in her continued empire Rome should be a spirit- 
ual sovereign, and not a temporal one. Eome, said 
Jornandes, no longer held the world by arms, but by 
men's imaginations. 

This faith, this resolute purpose of Leo, it cannot 
be denied that he carried into effect by diplomacy 
and state-craft, as well as preached it for a religious 
creed. In judging this, again, it is best to see the 
situation as it really was. Leo was shrewd, wary, 
persistent, determined, watchful of opportunity, after 
the manner of statesmen. A large part of his policy 
must be judged by the ethics of statesmanship, rather 
than by the humbler private moralities. In this, 
however, two things may be claimed for him : that 
the motive of his game was nobler, and the stake he 
played for higher, than that of the mere statesman ; 
and that, while his policy was often stern and over- 
bearing, it was never treacherous or cruel. As for 
personal ambition, or selfish designs, as that phrase is 
commonly understood, it does not appear that a 
shadow of such a motive passed upon his mind, or a 
shadow of such a suspicion ever rested upon his name. 
Assuming the one end and aim of his policy which 
he kept in view, all the acts of it were the natural, 
straightforward, resolute carrying out of it. That he 
meant to assert the spiritual sovereignty of Eome, and 
the official supremacy of the post he held, explains 
itself. That, with his high temper, he would have 
yielded to it in another man's hands the simple 
homage he claimed for it in his own, one may possi- 
bly doubt. But, standing where he did, and seeing 



160 LEO THE GREAT. 

what lie did, he believed in it with all his heart ; and 
it was well for the world that he did so believe in it. 

Thus he was on the watch from the first for an 
occasion to put his theory into force. The occasion 
was quickly found : a strong man, in fact, never has 
to wait long for it. Two hundred years before, under 
Tertullian and Cyprian, the churches in Africa had 
been, in strength and eloquence, the worthy pioneers 
of Latin Christianity. Later still, under Augustine, 
their fame had far surpassed that of Eome, in every- 
thing except the accident of their provincial situation. 
But they had been torn and rent by the schism of the 
Donatists. Augustine himself had spent a great part 
of his strength in incessant controversy ; and he was 
now fifteen years dead, and Vandal buccaneers lording 
it over the whole Barbary coast. The church at Eome, 
and Leo, its vigorous head, made the natural court of 
appeal for the afflicted province ; and so the first stone 
was laid of that strong confederation which afterwards 
grew to be the Catholic Empire of the West. 

Again, the opportunity came, half by accident, that 
led to official correspondence with the eastern coasts 
of the Adriatic, — an opportunity which Leo was not 
slow to improve. He always assumes his authority, 
never defends it ; advises, urges, instructs, and in fact 
exercises on the soil of Greece the jurisdiction which 
the feebler Patriarch of Constantinople, leaning on 
court influence, and jealous of a claim he had no 
strength to enforce, found daily slipping from his 
hand. This advantage Leo pushed, as we have seen, 
to the extent of directing, almost (it would seem) of 
dictating, the counsels at Chalcedon. He failed, how- 



HILARY OF ARLES. 161 

ever, in the one point of securing the formal admis- 
sion by the East of the claims of Eome. The Council 
was careful to declare — in its celebrated twenty- 
eighth canon, which he was equally careful to disown 
— that Constantinople, the metropolis and official 
capital of Christendom, held equal rank. And to that 
declaration the East still adheres to-day. 

The critical test, however, of Leo's theory was in 
Gaul. That firmly allied with Eome, the West at 
least was secure. Now the churches of Southern 
Gaul were about as old as that of Eome ; claimed, in- 
deed, to have been founded by Paul himself.* They 
had been famous and strong from the very earliest 
time. Their martyr record was of the noblest ; their 
Irenasus, in the second century, of far more weight 
than any Eoman name ; their St. Martin, in the fourth, 
the purest and bravest of all who had carried the 
faith into the barbarous West. Besides, that country 
was earliest of all, under the old Eoman dominion, 
to feel conscious of the germs of a new nationality. 
" Eldest daughter of Eome " the flatteries of Catholic 
pontiffs have delighted in calling her ; but a daughter 
that long and often has contested vigorously the 
mother's will. 

Hilary of Aries, for some ecclesiastical offence, 
had displaced one of his bishops, Celiclonius, who 
promptly appealed to Eome. Leo, as promptly, with- 
out waiting to inquire, but eager to assert his juris- 
diction, restored Celidonius to his place. Hilary, of 

* One of the principal ones, at Treves, by the widow's son of 
Nain, who had been miraculously raised, a second time, by the 
laying on of Peter's staff. 



162 LEO THE GREAT. 

ruder temper than Leo and at least as resolute, gray- 
haired but vigorous, at once took his staff, and went 
upon foot, in midwinter,* all the way to Rome. He 
was sure that Leo did not understand the merits of 
the case. He would not be put off, he said, with the 
smooth compliments that greeted him, and pushed 
his plea so hotly that Leo arrested him for contempt, 
and put him under guard. He broke bounds, how- 
ever, and went back the way he came, noway ready 
to submit, — deprived, meanwhile, of a large part of 
the region he presided in. Still Leo's victory might 
have hung doubtful, but that he prudently obtained 
a decree from the worthless Valentinian III. (445), 
who ruled in a sort of phantom sovereignty at Ra- 
venna, declaring not only the subjection of Gaul and 
of every other province to the Pope at Rome, but that 
" to all men, whatever the authority of the Apostolic 
See has ordained, or does, or shall ordain, shall be as 
law." f 

Those which I have recited were the most notable 
occasions on which Leo asserted and maintained the 
spiritual authority of Rome; They were the critical 
acts of his sovereignty ; and they have sketched, in 
vigorous outline, the pretensions of the Pontificate, 
which have been continually reasserted, in precisely 
the same direction and general terms, down to our 
day. Nothing on earth has been so consistent or per- 
sistent as this ecclesiastical policy of Rome. What- 

* On this journey we may assume that he departed from his 
usual winter custom of going barefoot. 

t See the terms of the Decree in Greenwood's Cathedra Petri, 
Vol.1, pp. 353, 354. 



GROWTH OF THE PAPACY. 163 

ever we may think about it now, it had its uses and 
necessities once ; and we shall see them the more 
plainly as we get deeper into the shadow of barbarian 
times, and then into the twilight of Feudalism. Just 
now, it is our business to see only how they lay in 
the mind and shaped the policy of one strong, reso- 
lute, and sagacious man. 

Even that, however, dealing as it did with great 
things, would not have been what it was in the his- 
tory of human events, except for the incessant, un- 
tiring vigilance in little things. How little these 
we're, yet how important in his eyes, — the ordering 
of a festival, the discipline of a churchman, the ex- 
plaining of a phrase, the reiteration of a counsel or a 
command, — one can see only in the details of his 
homilies and his correspondence. In these, we watch 
as it were the process by which that enormous fabric 
of ecclesiastical power was woven, thread by thread, 
till it seemed to wrap inseparably, like the membrane 
of a living body, every limb and interior organ of the 
great structure of mediaeval civilization. 

We see the process ; but we see it only in one cor- 
ner of its working, and for one moment of time. The 
same thing was going on incessantly, untiringly, over 
many a thousand miles, for many a hundred years, 
still following the form and pattern that had been 
traced by that strong hand, still appealing to and 
guided by the very maxims and phrases that we have 
heard from that resolute voice. The unity of counsel 
in multiplicity of operations, which we call Catholi- 
cism, — apparently as strong to-day, in its own sphere, 
as a thousand years ago, and as able to send its ser- 



164 LEO THE GREAT. 

vants to their post in hamlet or forest as then, as little 
afraid as then of sword or fire or torture or starva- 
tion, that great wonder of human history, the disci- 
pline of a vast population, like an army loyal to one 
flag and obedient to one word of command, — has 
been the task of many ages and many men. In the 
fifteen centuries of its existence it has produced enor- 
mous good and enormous evil. But it is justice to 
the name of Leo to say that the ideal good, without 
the inseparable evil, was what lay in his heart and 
made his strength ; and to recognize him as the one 
man, in that day of terror and despair, who was wise 
enough and strong enough to do its necessary task. 



VIII. 
MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE. 

IT is hard for us to estimate fairly the value of a 
thing so utterly alien from the modern mind as 
the monastic spirit, with the ascetic practices and the 
religious forms that grew out of it. To judge it out 
of hand is easy enough from the modern point of 
view, which puts in relief its corruptions and absurd- 
ities, and contrasts it with what we know as the help- 
ful and saving forces of society now. It is also easy 
to recount the services of the monastic orders, for 
several centuries, in the shelter of the weak, the 
preservation of letters, the building up of intelligent 
and free industry. What is not so easy is to appre- 
ciate the strength and fervor of the monastic passion 
itself, as a moral force, and its value as a factor in 
history. 

A series of careful studies, or else of brilliant and 
impressive pictures, by such writers as Guizot, Monta- 
lembert, and Charles Kingsley, aids very much to 
bring this matter within the range of our modern 
sympathy and understanding. For my present pur- 
pose, however, I must avoid all these attractive 
fields of illustration. I must also avoid for the 
most part that great, strange field of Eastern ascet- 
icism, with the exhibition it offers, sometimes tender 



166 MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE. 

and pathetic, often wild and repulsive, of cenobitic and 
eremitic life in the region that gave it birth. My 
object is simply to see how it entered as an element 
into the larger life that was unfolding towards the 
West. 

As early as the time of Athanashis and Augus- 
tine, monasticism had already powerfully affected the 
imagination of Western Europe, and led the way to 
some emulation of its fantastic austerities there.* It 
was not, however, till early in the sixth century that 
it was definitely embodied and organized as a social 
force by St. Benedict, whose death, in 543, left his 
monastery of Monte Casino the acknowledged type 
and head of the Western monastic life. At this date, 
then, it is to be recognized as a distinct and powerful 
element in the new civilization. 

My view of the subject, accordingly, will be by 
way of retrospect, and very simple. I wish to speak 
of Monasticism purely as a moral force, — the motive 
it sprang from, and the way in which it acted on 
men, mainly through their imagination and moral 
sympathy. 

First of all, we must go back a little, and remember 
that Christianity very early showed itself as a hostile 
and aggressive force, in sharp antagonism to the 
beliefs and customs prevailing in the world. This 
antagonistic attitude implies several things : deep 
conviction both of personal guilt and of existing evil, 
as in Paul ; a motive widely apart from philosophic 

* The monastery of St. Honoratus, founded about 400, in the 
island of Lerins (or St. Honors), off the southern coast of France, 
was the chief head-quarters of early Western monasticism. 



THE FORLORN HOPE. 167 

speculation, as shown in the controversy against the 
Gnostics ; a symbol of faith accepted with absolute 
loyalty, to fight under as a banner, as with the creed 
of Athanasius ; a definite appointing of the field of 
conflict in the individual conscience or conviction, 
as with Augustine ; a powerful visible organization, 
acting as one, like an army, under its official head, 
which post of authority had been claimed and main- 
tained by Leo. Each of these has already been sepa- 
rately considered. 

But, for its greatest efficiency, a fighting force needs 
one other thing. It needs its outposts, its skirmish- 
ers, its corps of desperate fighters ; men absolutely 
reckless of all fears, and bound by no interests or 
hopes except such as identify them with the strength 
and life of the army itself ; volunteers, who make its 
advance guard in battle and its forlorn hope at a 
crisis ; a body of reserve, to whom life itself is a thing 
utterly indifferent in comparison with the honor of 
the service, and all other affection thin and cold 
except that which makes it their one pride to fight 
under the flag, and their joy to die for it. From 
Marathon down to Plevna, it is safe to say that no 
army has been great, and no military dominion 
strong, that could not count on the absolute devotion 
of such a reserve force, — a body to which danger 
itself has an irresistible fascination, whose one mas- 
ter-passion is warrior zeal, whose hot desire is for the 
fiery delight of combat. 

To say, then, that the Church was victorious in the 
war it undertook, is to say that it had at its command 
such a body of enthusiasts, a body of absolute loyalty 



168 MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE. 

and fanatic zeal ; whose zeal, indeed, might outrun 
prudence and turn to frenzy, yet for that very reason 
could be counted on when the battle would be hope- 
less without just that aid, — the sharp edge of attack, 
the obstinate heroism of defence. In fact, the Church 
had two such bodies of reserve : one for the time of 
persecution in the conflict against Paganism, — the 
Martyrs ; one for the time of organized conquest 
that followed, in the conflict against Barbarism, — 
the Monastics. It is necessary to say a word on the 
motive common to them both. 

We must not forget — at the earlier stage, espe- 
cially, of the conflict we are considering — that Chris- 
tianity presents itself to us in the form of a moral 
reaction, or protest, against the gross inhumanities 
and corruptions of Pagan society. This reaction would 
be mild with some natures, violent with others. So 
much we may easily understand. But what it was, 
precisely, that it reacted against, requires some knowl- 
edge of obscure authorities and some hardihood of 
speech to show. We cannot always, it may be, trust 
the eager invective of Christian apologists like Tertul- 
lian ; though where he refers to plain and well-known 
fact, we have no right to deny his witness. But we 
have a right to judge the Pagan world out of its own 
mouth; and then there are testimonies written be- 
tween the lines of classic authors — such testimonies, 
for instance, as the frescos at Pompeii — which help 
us to an understanding of the darker facts. In Hor- 
ace we have, mainly, an easy epicureanism, smooth 
and fair, and only beginning to be withered at the 
core ; in Juvenal, a stoicism no longer humane, but 



THE ROMAN SPECTACLES. 169 

bitter and austere ; in Petronius, who was Nero's 
friend, a cynicism nakedly revolting. 

These, however, are only hints of Eoman manners, 
and perhaps may be overcharged : it would be easy to 
make a picture just as black of a Christian capital 
to-day. But there are two points of public morality 
at that period, which we can quite understand, and 
which to the most placid temper now are full of hor- 
ror : its brutal cruelty, and its beastly shamelessness. 
Unless we do know these, we cannot understand the 
violence, even fury, of the recoil against them. We 
looTi at the statue of the dying gladiator, " butchered 
to make a Eoman holiday," and we cannot well avoid 
a thrill of human pity. What have we to say, then, 
that the wise and merciful Trajan, for whose salvation 
Gregory prayed, remembering his patient kindness to 
a widow suppliant, made the amphitheatre reek with 
the blood of ten thousand such, to grace one holiday ? 
Wild beasts, we are told, were often lacking in the 
vast numbers needed to glut the Eoman thirst for 
blood ; but human victims, captives of war, were never 
wanting. 

This is but an item of the charge. It is hard for 
us to understand or forgive the brutality of a Spanish 
bull-fight, where dainty ladies applaud, or give the 
signal for the blow. The Eoman mob — men and 
women, noble and base — looked on with the same 
eager lust of blood, when the wild bull gored or the 
famished tiger tore the delicate side of some modest 
trembling Christian girl, set naked in the pit before 
that gazing multitude, or else tangled in transparent 
nets. Three times Blandina was thus exposed at 
8 



170 MONASTICISM AS A MOEAL FORCE. 

Vienna, in Gaul, till a barbarian in mercy pierced her 
breast with a sword. Perpetua and Felicitas, in 
Carthage, were allowed out of pure horror to wrap 
themselves in mantles, before the gladiator finally 
despatched them with his " stroke of grace." These 
were mere girls, maidens or young wives, on the 
edge of womanhood, innocent, beautiful. 

Eeligious frenzy, perhaps, made these horrors possi- 
ble. But the blood-spoilt crowd of the amphitheatre 
needed no such motive of a heated fanaticism. To 
satisfy the lust of the eye, a drama representing the 
death of Hercules on Mount (Eta was not complete 
without a robust captive bound and burned on the 
funeral pile, whose yells and writhings might coun- 
terfeit those death-agonies. " We have seen it," says 
Tertullian. And, with still beastlier ferocity, in the 
masks and mummeries of the Eoman stage, the muti- 
lations, rapes, and debaucheries, that stain the corrupt 
mythology of Greece, were with a horrible realism 
presented nakedly before the public eye.* 

These hints will probably be enough to show what, 
in some of its more shocking forms, it was that the 
martyr church had to protest against. Nothing, it is 
plain, except the martyr spirit, in its most vehement 
and (if you will) fanatic form would have borne the 
battle or gained the victory. I say nothing and I 
know nothing about the frequency of these spectacles. 
It is enough to know that they were possible, and that 

* The better known authorities for these statements are Sue- 
tonius, Martial, and Tertullian. Other authorities and details will 
be found in Ozanam's Civilisation au Quatrieme Steele. See also 
Kenan's recent " English Conferences." 



THE CHRISTIAN MARTYRS. 171 

they are what the world was forever delivered from 
in the triumph of Christianity * Along with the 
vivid picture given of these horrors in his "Anti- 
christ," Eenan tells us of the contagion of the martyr 
spirit, — how eagerly not only hardy fanatics, but 
modest matron and maiden, pressed toward the con- 
summation of that awful sacrifice, just as volunteers 
press to the most hazardous post in battle or siege ; 
and how the flame of that great passion burned away 
all lesser thoughts of affection, duty, and shame. 

Or take the following, from one of the earlier mar- 
tyrologies. " My father," says Perpetua, " came from 
the city, wasted with anxiety, to prevent me ; and he 
said, ' Have pity, my daughter, on my gray hairs ; 
have pity on thy father, if he is worthy the name of 
father.' And so saying, he kissed my hands in his 
fondness, and threw himself at my feet, calling me 
in his tears no longer daughter, but lady. And I was 
grieved for the gray hairs of my father, because he 
only, of all our family, did not rejoice in my martyr- 
dom. It is difficult for us to take in the hardness of 
this young mother, at once to her father and her babe. 
It is more shocking still to think that to them the 
fiery or bloody death was an escape from ignominy 
which to them was far more dreadful. Eusebius tells 
of a mother who esteemed it a happy chance to drown 
herself with her three daughters, rather than trust the 
mercy of their jailer ; and there is hardly a plea on 

* Doubtless the Spanish bull-fights are almost as brutal, and 
the autos dafe of the Inquisition were, as a form of human sacri- 
fice, still more cruel. Still, these last appealed only to the pity 
and terror of beholders, not to their beastlier passions. 



172 MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE. 

record more piteous in its suggestion, than where 
Augustine argues that, by brutal treatment in their 
prison, Christian maidens had not lost their honor in 
the sight of God. 

The extraordinary romance of St. Thekla, which we 
may count as the earliest Christian novel, is quite pos- 
sibly founded upon fact. She is a young lady of high 
birth, who innocently and unconsciously — perhaps 
without the writer's consciousness either — falls (as 
we should say) in love with the Apostle Paul. Cast 
off by her mother because she will not accept the hus- 
band provided for her, she travels from place to place 
as a Christian missionary, is exposed in the theatre to 
lions, who fight with each other instead, till both are 
killed ; the people then take sudden pity on her ; and 
thus, miraculously saved, she finds refuge in a her- 
mitage, where she lives a long life of pious solitude. 
Thus a single life serves as link between the martyr 
age and the age of monastic asceticism ; and the same 
spirit is the inspiration of both. 

In their most strongly marked features, however, it 
must be said that they belong to two different periods. 
The martyr age expired when Christianity came to 
the throne with Constantine; asceticism was most 
fervent, and its haunts most crowded, in the time im- 
mediately following. One, in fact, blends insensibly 
into the other. The eager, perhaps frantic temper, 
trained through whole generations up to the heat of 
martyr zeal, was not content to repose in the tame 
quiet of a religious peace. The solitude, the austerity, 
the self-inflicted torment, the denial of human kind- 
ness, which might have been a refuge or a compromise 



THE ASCETIC MOTIVE. 173 

at a time of real danger, became the accepted way of 
working to that exalted temper. 

What had been the passionate phase of a reaction 
against pagan brutality, was now an intolerant and 
hot protest against the love of ease and the lingering 
sensuality that Paganism left behind. This intol- 
erant protest had flashed out once or twice before, in 
the hot anger and contempt felt towards those who 
had " lapsed " under the storm of persecution, whom 
it was held infamous, with whatever penance, to take 
back to the bosom of the faithful ; and so had arisen 
the Novatian schism and the schism of the Donatists,* 
and the fury of the Circumcellions, who rushed in a 
mad way upon their death, courting martyrdom, — 
disorders whose tradition vexed the Church for more 
than three centuries. The same temper, now that 
Christianity was in the ascendant, showed itself in 
the many forms of ascetic and monastic life. 

It is not necessary to dwell here on the tempting 
features of anecdote and adventure which illustrate 
that way of life. Two points only we have to consider : 
its power as a motive in the mind of the ascetics 
themselves ; and its power as a moral force among > 
men, through imagination, sympathy, or emulation. 

As to the former, I do not think we are content with 
any theory of motives to account for asceticism, out- 
side the moral quality of asceticism itself, and its 
strange fascination to an order of feeling always pow- 
erful in human nature. It is easy, but it is delusive, 
to say that men deliberately set themselves by aus- 
terities and penance to win for themselves peculiar 

* Well called by Mr. Hodgkin " the Cameronians of Africa." 



174 MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE. 

glories or joys in paradise. Possibly they may give 
that for their own account of it, so deceiving them- 
selves. But no profit-and-loss calculation like that 
ever inspired that passion, of whose insanest extreme 
we have so wonderful a picture in Tennyson's " St. 
Simeon Stylites " : — 

" Bethink thee, Lord! while thou and all the saints 
Enjoy themselves in heaven, and men on earth 
House in the shade of comfortable roofs, 
Sit with their wives by fires, eat wholesome food, 
And wear warm clothes, and even beasts have stalls, — 
I, 'tween the spring and downfall of the light, 
Bow down one thousand and two hundred times, 
To Christ, the Virgin Mother, and the saints; 
Or in the night, after a little sleep, 
I wake: the chill stars sparkle; I am wet 
With drenching dews, or stiff in the crackling frost; 
I wear an undressed goat-skin on my back ; 
A grazing iron collar grinds my neck ; 
And in my weak lean arms I lift the cross, 
And strive and wrestle with thee till I die. 
O mercy, mercy ! wash away my sin ! ' ' 

In these strange outbursts, which echo the very 
passion and fervor of ascetic life, we find something 
far deeper than the balanced reckoning of chances be- 
tween paradise and hell. We find, in the first place, 
a conviction of moral un worthiness morbidly intense ; 
and in the next place, the flame of a peculiar passion, 
that feeds on everything as fuel that it can lay hold 
upon. 

Of the first, the intense conviction of sin, it may 
perhaps be said to be, in one or another form, the 
source of all the moral power existing and operative 
It is not worth while to analyze it here, 



SINFULNESS OF THE FLESH. 175 

where it simply takes on an extravagant, fantastic, 
unfamiliar form. It becomes to us simply a morbid 
phenomenon, one manifestation of a force known to 
us in many other calmer and (it may be) more in- 
structive ways. 

Only, a word should be said of the root from which 
it grew, in a notion of the essential iniquity of all 
pleasures of sense, — an intense recoil from the ex- 
treme sensualism of ancient life. "In me," says 
Paul, " that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing." * 
The ascetic life, says Sozomen, is "no compromise 
between virtue and vice." This opinion of the radi- 
cally evil nature of matter, and in especial the matter 
of which our bodies are composed, must be presumed 
in all our knowledge of the subject. 

By a certain morbid logic, too, sensations repulsive 
to the sense were thought a fit penance, and directly 
pleasing to God. Thus, to take a few instances, 
chiefly from the admiring Greek historians : — St. 
Anthony would scarce suffer clean water to touch his 
feet or hands. St. Arsenius would change the water he 
used in weaving rushes but once a year. St. Hilarion 
built himself a hut too small to let him stand upright or 
lie at length. St. Hallas touched no bread for seventy 
years, contenting himself with roots and herbs. St. 

* This is oddly illustrated in the following formula of confes- 
sion : " I confess all the sins of my body, — of my skin, of my flesh, 
of my hones and sinews, of my veins and cartilages, of my tongue 
and lips, of my jaws, teeth, and hair, of my marrow, and any other 
part whatsoever, whether it be soft or hard, wet or dry." No peti- 
tion is more frequent, in some of the older rituals, than that God 
would be pleased to accept our leanness and mortification of the 
flesh. 



176 MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE. 

Senoch walled himself to the neck in a narrow cir- 
cuit, too small to let him move or sit, and lived there 
for years. St. Wulfilaich was hardly persuaded to 
quit the pillar elevation in the north of Gaul, where 
he stood barefoot, summer and winter, till his nails 
dropped off with the bitter cold.* Some wore heavy 
crosses, chains, or iron bands ; some had no covering 
but their long, unwashed, and shaggy hair, living in 
dens the. life of beasts. The brawny St. Moses, to tire 
down his sinful muscular strength, stood praying every 
night for six years, without sleep. St. Stephen kept 
on weaving baskets, while the surgeons were ampu- 
tating a limb. These idle heroisms are the voice of 
the ascetic conscience, morbidly acute ; but they are 
also, like the training of our athletes, a test of what 
may be clone in battle or endured in the siege. 
r Of what may be called the ascetic passion, however, 
something remains to be added. It is a very shallow 
theory of life, to say that the main motive, with most 
men, is the pursuit of happiness, — at least in any 
sense in which happiness can be defined to the under- 
standing, or chosen by the judgment. It is hardly an 
exaggeration, on the other hand, to say that many 
persons set their hearts on misery, and pursue it witli 
an obstinacy that we might call insane. I do not 
think, for example, that the ascetic passion of a her- 
mit or a monk is different at bottom or harder to un- 
derstand — except for such moral quality as may be 
in it — than the pining, wretched, eager self-denial of 

* These practices, said his unflattering adviser, may be fit for 
the great saints and holy men of the East ; but a poor ignorant 
barbarian like you should not aspire to such high things. 



THE HABIT OF SACRIFICE. 177 

a rich miser, the very type that takes its name from 
"misery." And those argue weakly with human 
nature as it is, who appeal first to men's desire of com- 
fort and selfish ease. Hardihood and adventure, the 
joy of conflict, defiance of danger, generous self-aban- 
donment, are each and all more powerful motives in 
real life, — not perhaps for weak characters, but at any 
rate for strong ones. The six hundred who rode " into 
the jaws of death," facing loaded cannon, do not show 
it any more plainly than those other hundreds who 
went the other day to risk their lives in pestilential 
cities at the South; not more plainly than the father 
or mother, of average conscience and self-denial, who 
submits with never a thought to the innumerable priva- 
tions which define the commonest conditions of duty 
or (it may be) of indulgence to the child. 

And so the habit of self-denial grows, till one 'may 
come to feel — who has not known such ? — as if the 
very sensation of pleasure itself were a sin. Occa- 
sionally we know of lives that are literally made a 
sacrifice, not so much to a mere notion of duty, how- 
ever morbidly scrupulous, as to a mood of mind in 
which austerity itself, and self-torment, have come to 
take the place of duty : not that they are chosen freely 
as being right, but have grown into a moral necessity, 
and so make the men their slaves. 

Look at the heart of any such man, and you find 
that the sacrifice, far from being a price weighed out 
and duly paid, has come, by the mere cultivation of a 
sense of duty, to be a delight in itself, as truly as the 
enthusiasm of adventure or the contempt of danger. 
It is, indeed, the very business of religious discipline 

8* L 



178 MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE. 

to guide and train what may so come to be a mighty 
master passion. And we should not fail, through any 
shallow theory of pleasure, to see how prodigious a 
force the Church enlisted, when it gave to what we 
have called the ascetic passion recognition and a 
sphere. The time would soon come when that great 
force would be needed, no longer for defence or idle 
contemplation, but for active service. 

That time came, indeed, in a very dramatic way. 
In the flush of his temporary triumph over Alaric, 
Honorius had renewed at Eome, in 404, the old 
splendor of the public games ; and, Christian as he 
was, and against the warm protest of men's better 
feeling, brought his show to a climax by a combat 
of gladiators, a spectacle forbidden long before by 
Christian law. When the sport was at its height, 
the monk Telemachus, who had come (it is said) all 
the way from Egypt to do it, threw himself into the 
arena, between the swords of the combatants, and 
was crushed under a shower of stones from the angry 
mob, — " the only monk," says Gibbon, " who died a 
martyr in the cause of humanity." This brave act 
put a final stop to the brutal sport. 

But Gibbon's comment is not true. Whole genera- 
tions of Christian monks lived, and a great many of 
them died, in cruel martyrdom, in working out that 
long task by which the barbarian world — less cor- 
rupt, no doubt, than the old Pagan society, but almost 
inconceivable in its ferocity — was brought into the 
pale of Christian civilization. Some features and con- 
ditions of that task we shall have to consider at an- 
other time. At present we have to do only with the 



THE MONK AS MISSIONARY. 179 

way in which this great moral power was trained and 
equipped to undertake it. 

One feature of it, however, I must mention here. 
It is the spectacle that offers itself to our imagina- 
tion, as the face of the world slowly changes, from its 
comparatively orderly and familiar look in the classic 
age, to what it had become when the barbarian hordes 
gave it the wild and strange complexion it wore so 
long. We see the process at a great distance ; and, 
so seen, the features of one age melt insensibly into 
those of another, so that it is no hard thing to us to 
call the change an unmixed good. But in the time 
of it, as we must not forget, there were infinite details 
of literally unspeakable horror, — details which you 
find hints of in Gibbon's foot-notes, or can read at 
more length in the half-barbaric authorities he cites, 
Jornandes, Liutprand, Paulus Diaconus, and Gregory 
of Tours. Now, when that three centuries' storm 
settled down upon the Western world, innumerable 
outposts were already held by religious zealots, whom 
an ascetic fervor had scattered through Italy and Gaul, 
and along the confines of Germany, some in solitary 
hermitages, some in bands and brotherhoods, many 
with a faith burning in them, and a yearning for the 
souls of those wild barbarians, in whom they saw 
— as Salvian did — more hopeful subjects of Christ 
than in the corrupt and degenerate population they 
had turned their backs upon. 

Some of their religious retreats were the refuge of 
cowards, — so it was charged ; of men who had cast 
off all love of their country, who had lost the sense 
of honor and public duty, who dared not look the 



180 MONASTICISM AS A MOEAL FOECE. 

times in the face.* Most likely. Among those who 
simply sought religious solitude or religious fellow- 
ship in those retreats, it would be hard to draw the 
line between pure cowardice and genuine despair of 
the perishing world they forsook, — despair that would 
settle upon many a mind, doubtless, as if the end of 
all things were really at hand, and the only remain- 
ing duty were to make one's peace with God, as on a 
death-bed. 

But not so with those who undertook such tasks as 
the time made possible. Many, probably most of 
those who are worthily recorded as the saints — that 
is, the moral heroes — of that evil time, were men 
trained in monastic discipline, hardened to service 
by the interior conflicts which that discipline im- 
plied. 

And we have not to forget, either, the immense 
effect of these austerities, of the strange humanity 
and tenderness often joined with them, of the strange 
vision and the new ideal of sanctity, offered before 
the eyes and powerfully affecting the imagination of 
the rude, cruel, unsophisticated invaders. The more 
familiar accounts of St. Martin in France and St. 
Severinus in South Germany illustrate vividly this 
moral reaction. 

In general, Catholic writers do completer justice 
than we do to this unfamiliar but most noble phase 
of religious heroism. It is hard for a Protestant to 
forget the strong repugnance which monastic life 
called out in the time of its degeneracy. But we 

* The ground taken by Valens (about 375), in his conscription 
of monks for civil or military duty. 



SAINT BENEDICT. 181 

are not concerned here with those later scandals and 
controversies. "We have only to see and understand 
a very genuine exhibition of moral power among men 
to whom that way was the best they knew, and at a 
time when no better service could possibly be given 
to the world. Some of these lives commend them- 
selves easily to our judgment : as of Cassiodorus, the 
minister and secretary of Theodoric ; and of Fortu- 
natus, a genuine man of letters, whose verses, in- 
scribed to that gentle recluse queen Kadegonda, or to 
his friend Gregory of Tours, make the closing pages 
in the great body of classic Latin poetry.* But hun- 
dreds and thousands of them passed away unknown, 
and only added each its drop or its rill to the vast 
stream which was widening into the new civilization. 
Of others, again, it must be said that their asceticism 
was sheer idle pretence, and slid into intoxication and 
madness. The perils of that way of life became quite 
plain, even at this- time; and they needed a discipline 
very sharp and severe to keep them in some sort of 
check. The discipline which prevailed in Europe for 
many generations, vigorous and wholesome, was that 
of St. Benedict, established during the prosperous rule 
of the Goth Theodoric. The anecdotes of his life we 
need not dwell on : how as. a child of twelve, with 
the connivance of his maid, he ran away and hid in a 
cave from his vicious schoolfellows, till he was given 
up for dead ; how, to deliver himself once for all from 
" the demon of the flesh," he stripped and rolled 
among thorns till his skin was lacerated from head 
to foot ; how, as head of his monastery, he ruled his 
* See below, " The Christian Schools." 



182 MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE. 

monks so sharply that they turned against him and 
tried to poison him in a bowl of wine ; how his fame 
for sanctity grew, till he was obliged to flee again to 
the rocky retreat of Monte Casino, where his most 
famous of monastic houses continues an object of pil- 
grimage to this day.* 

Here he established his firm code of discipline on 
the three-fold vow, not to be taken till after due pro- 
bation and the severest tests of resolution, of Poverty, 
Chastity, and Obedience. The first meant simple and 
absolute community of goods : the religious house 
might and afterwards did revel in enormous wealth ; 
but the individual monk owned nothing. We shall 
compare this presently with the later Mendicant 
Orders, so that here we have only to notice the 
pledge it gave of absolute devotion to the common 
interest, and the enormous associated strength of the 
brotherhood. The vow of Chastity at once forbade 
all family ties, and put npon the conscience the task 
through life of keeping np the ascetic discipline 

* There is an odd story of the occasion of this retreat. A bevy 
of gay girls from Rome — whom no doubt the grim ascetics took 
to be emissaries of the Devil — went out " for a lark " one day to 
visit and perhaps cheer their dull abode ; and tried, with all co- 
quetries and blandishments, to coax them back to the city, and to 
carnal ways. In horror at what might possibly come of it, Bene- 
dict made all haste to the rudest spot he could find among the 
rugged spurs of the hills. 

It was on a like occasion that an aged monk was observed to 
look very earnestly at the sauciest and most fascinating of the 
group; and when his companions asked him why, replied, "Be- 
cause it is revealed to me that she shall judge us all." Within a 
short time, in fact, she became a penitent, and passed her life in the 
austerest sanctity. For Benedict's miracles, see Migne's Patrologia, 
cxlix. 965. 



THE VOW OF OBEDIENCE. 183 

which had originated that mode of life. We shall 
see its immense consequences hereafter, when under 
Hildebrand the monastic spirit gained complete rule 
in the Church, and engaged in its sharpest-fought 
battle against human nature, 

For the present, then, I have but a word to say of 
the vow of Obedience. It was in this that the West- 
ern or Benedictine discipline differed most widely 
from the ascetic life of the East, which (in its degen- 
eracy at least) aimed only at piety and maceration ; 
and it was in this that it rendered its essential ser- 
vice to the modern world. For obedience, in the 
rigidly practical rule of Benedict, meant steady, gen- 
uine, useful work. "Labor are est or are " became the 
monkish chime. Seven hours of manual labor were 
required daily, besides study in the afternoon. The 
old and feeble, who could do nothing else, were set to 
copy manuscripts ; and so saved to the world not 
only a host of religious works, but whole libraries of 
ancient classics. The toil of the Benedictines has 
become a proverb of literary industry. They had 
abundant leisure for it. One monk is said to have 
spent a lifetime illuminating a single letter. Im- 
mense results came of this organized industry. It 
rescued labor itself from the degradation of its old 
servile memories, made it intelligent, skilful, and free, 
as well as a religious duty. There were no such 
estates in Europe, nowhere so thrifty farming or so 
tasteful gardening, as the monasteries had to show. 
It was the monks who were clearers of the forest, 
drainers of the marsh, frontiersmen, pioneers of civil- 
ization, founders of more than half the towns of 



184 MONASTICISM AS A MORAL FORCE. 

France. They steadily recruited, through times of in- 
conceivable peril, those armies of missionary-martyrs, 
by which the barbarian world was tamed and trained 
to a rude civilization. 

The evils of monastic life are plain to see : its 
enormous seeming waste of moral force, shed like 
showers on the bare sand of the desert ; the wild and 
ignorant fanaticism or religious madness it often ran 
into ; its hardening of the heart in the selfish seek- 
ing for salvation, so that the natural affections and 
humanities were crushed, and the monks became in 
due time the fit and merciless agents of the Inqui- 
sition ; the temptation to indulge indolence, hypoc- 
risy, and spiritual pride, with secret and abominable 
vices demanding periodical reform. The memory of 
such things makes us content that we shall never 
know it any more. Still, it would not have had its 
opportunity of evil, but for the immense service it 
rendered at a critical period, when old things were 
passing away, and new foundations must be laid in 
the absolute courage, the denial of self-interest, the 
strenuous virtue, the loyal obedience, which make the 
ideal of that way of life ; when not science, strength, 
and skill, but poverty, hardship, and self-denial were 
the power that overcame the world. 



IX. 
CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST, 

THE main stream of Christian civilization, as it 
affects the great events of history and as it in- 
terests us in particular, follows a westward course, 
and is bounded for a thousand years within the 
limits that contain the Catholic Empire of the Mid- 
dle Age. The separation of East and West was 
slowly coming about for at least three centuries, 
before it became definite and final in the controver- 
sies of the ninth century ; and the parting of the 
Christian world into two jealous and hostile frag- 
ments (879} lasted through many a peril that assailed 
them both alike, till one was swallowed up in the 
conquests of the Turk, and the other rent by the great " 
Protestant schism, with its innumerable sects. 

There is something of pathos in calling to mind 
that the most obstinate motive of a separation involv- 
ing such tremendous historical consequences was the 
persistence of the West in holding that the Holy 
Ghost proceeds not from the Father only, but also from ) 
the Son, — to us a pure piece of unintelligible meta- 
physics, or else the statement of a very simple moral 
fact ; and that, on the very eve of the ferocious assault 
in which Constantinople fell, when terms of union 
had been with difficulty negotiated at Florence to 



186 CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST. 

secure a Christian league against the infidel (1438), 
these terms were repudiated by the fanatic sectaries 
of the East, who chose the risk of Ottoman slavery 
rather than accept the hated symbol of Western 
heresy. 

But we have to deal at present not with these criti- 
cal events of history so much as with certain charac- 
teristics that mark the contrast of the two ; and with 
one or two phases of the Oriental Church that show 
the position it holds in Christian history. 

The contrast I speak of is exactly indicated, first, 
by the division-line between the two languages, Greek 
and Latin, in which the symbols of faith were re- 
spectively set forth. Greek lends itself easily to 
metaphysical discussions and nice logical distinctions, 
which Latin could but imperfectly follow, at least till 
it was tortured to metaphysical uses by the School- 
men. The Greeks complained that the language of 
their formulae could not be adequately rendered in 
another tongue.* It is clear that, if the meaning of 
the Christian symbol, much more the salvation that 
comes of actual belief, turns on the hair-breadth dis- 

* Thus the word hypostasis (to take a very familiar case), which 
is used to express the distinctions in the Trinity, corresponds ety- 
mologically to the Latin substantia, " substance " ; but this word 
means exactly what the theologians did not wish to say, and so 
they chose the word persona instead (literally mask), which we 
very inadequately render " person," — really meaning the part, or 
character, acted in a play, as in our phrase dramatis personam. Tims 
the metaphysical terms ovcrta (essentia), viroo-rao-is (substantia), and 
irpSacairov (persona) are more or less interchangeable, and give rise 
to endless discussion. According to Gregory of Nyssa, what ovala 
is to the class, that virSo-racris is to the individual. We find this 
discussion going on, brisk as ever, in Peter Lombard (about 1170). 



CONTRASTS OF EAST AND WEST. 187 

tinctions which can hardly be stated in words, and 
are untranslatable at best, there is absolutely no end 
of controversy. Leo the Great did wisely to cut the 
knot by laying down his own hard- and-fast definition, 
which contented the West then, and does so to this 
day ; while the East wrecked itself helplessly on the 
successive sharp points that turned up in the crooked 
channel of dispute, till it seemed to drift helplessly 
on a sea of metaphysics. 

Again, the West had a vigorous independent life 
of its own, — political, municipal, ecclesiastical, — of 
which Leo had the genius to seize the full advantage ; 
while church life in the East was absolutely over- 
shadowed by the imperial despotism, under which, as 
in the shelter of a great forest, it throve with a cer- 
tain pining, sickly, and distorted life of its own. Not 
that passion was wanting to it, or a certain fanatic, 
even ferocious courage : the religious riots of Constan- 
tinople, Antioch, and Alexandria were bloody and 
fierce as the old struggles of the Eoman forum. But 
they were the disorderly, irresponsible action of a 
mob, that might be crushed at any moment, -and 
periodically was, by the imperial military police, and 
could never develop any disciplined courage of its own. 
Indeed, how continually pressing, how closely haunt- 
ing, the imperial despotism was, it is hard for us to 
conceive, unless we remember that it inherited the 
cruel and despotic traditions of a Caesar or a Diocle- 
tian ; and that it left its methods of merciless exac- 
tion to be adopted and followed up in the unspeakable 
inflictions of Oriental tyranny to-day. Ecclesiastical 
rule was as minute, as tyrannous, as irritating here, as 



188 CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST. 

ever it was in the West ; but, awed by the nearness 
of the Court, and dazzled by the paraphernalia of 
Empire, it never had the free hand, even if it had the 
wise and willing heart, to effect any one of the great 
tasks of civilization. 

What it could do, however, it did. The courage 
and the devotedness of purpose were never wanting. 
Long lines of saints show that the ecclesiastic spirit, 
with its merits and its faults, was quite as fervent as 
in the West. It had, in fact, a quality of its own, 
which commands a genuine admiration. Looking at 
its better side, we seem to see in it a sweetness of 
piety, a gentleness of temper, a single-hearted moral 
fervor, a purely religious courage, a capacity of warm 
and long-abiding friendship, an absence of personal 
ambition, which are not to be sure wanting, but are 
less prominent traits, in the restless and energetic 
Latin Church.* 

These qualities answer well to the more dependent 
position just spoken of; and maybe held, justly, to 
have characterized the churches of Syria, Greece, and 
Egypt to this day, — where they subsist, insulated, 
helpless, non-resistant, disarmed, under the scornful 
tolerance of the Mussulman. To these we may add a 
certain simplicity of living often running into ascetic 
poverty, a clinging family life, a quickness of social 
sympathy, which seem to be their inheritance from an 
earlier phase of Christian life than was transmitted 
to the West, and which correspond with the primi- 
tive and easy ecclesiastical code that permits, even 

* In fact, we are hardly conscious of them there, until we come 
to the later and greater period of the Religious Orders. 



PERIODS OF INTEREST. 189 

if it does not require, the marriage of the humbler 
clergy. 

These general traits it is well to bear in mind, in 
studying the somewhat depressed and monotonous 
life of Eastern Christendom. While they show its 
good side, they help to remind us, also, of the feeble 
executive force it has always shown, the often hu- 
miliating attitude in the presence of authority, and 
the ignorant, gross, imbecile condition in which we 
find its lower clergy at this day in Eussia, as well as 
in Greece or Turkey. The political condition of the 
East, too, from the first Gothic invasion down, has 
shown little else than a succession of despotisms, and 
violent conquests, and wide-spread miseries, never 
once relieved by a show of genuine popular courage, 
or a vigorous national life. The Byzantine Empire, 
down to its fall in 1453, has always been a synonyme 
for indolent luxury, gaudy but meretricious splendor, 
pampered despotism, political degeneracy, and moral 
decay. Only a few broad features require our con- 
sideration now. 

As belonging to our present purpose, there are 
three phases of this languid history, which may de- 
tain our eye. These are, the period immediately fol- 
lowing the first Arian controversy ; the reign of 
Justinian ; and the Image-Controversy, with the at- 
tending circumstances that confirmed the separation 
of East and West, — this last preceded and followed 
by the vast catastrophe of the Mahometan invasion. 

I. The fervor, the sweetness, and the purely re- 
ligious intrepidity which I have spoken of as char- 
acterizing the Eastern Church, are seen nowhere to 



190 CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST. 

so great advantage as in the group of eminent and 
saintly men who adorn its calendar towards the end 
of the fourth century. There are many other names 
hardly less worthy ; but, for purposes of illustration, 
it is enough to mention four, who make a group 
together. 

Basil the Great, of Caesarea (329-379), eminently 
deserves to lead the list. High-minded, cultivated, 
self-denying, charitable, austere, bold before the face 
of power,* writer of the sweetest homilies on Crea- 
tion, Paradise, and the discipline of Providence, he is 
the great organizer of eastern monastic life.f Next is 
his friend Gregory of Nazianzus (330-391), the elo- 
quent ascetic, the personal antagonist of Julian, the 
vigorous champion of orthodoxy at the capital (where 
he raised it from a despised sect to a great popular 
enthusiasm), the contented exile when court intrigues 
drove him from the city to the harder penance of writ- 
ing odes and hymns. J Third is Gregory of Nyssa 
(331-395), younger brother of Basil, a theologian and 
commentator, a hard, clear, and serious thinker, a stu- 
dent of Greek philosophy, whose treasures he would 
gather for Christian uses, called " father of fathers " by 
an admiring council, the reconciler of divided churches, 
the thoughtful, gentle-minded Platonist, liberal and 
serene among sharp party conflicts. Last and most 
eminent of all is the bright name of John Chrysostom 

* Witness, especially, his intrepid correspondence with his old 
schoolfellow, the Emperor Julian. 

t Whose rules he lays down in replies to 313 Queries. 

X Luke's genealogy, for instance, in hexameters, and Matthew's 
in iambics ; besides the appalling chapters of Chronicles and Num- 
bers, and a drama on the death of Christ. 



FOUR GREEK DIVINES. 191 

(347-407), preacher of the "golden lips/' held by 
many to be the greatest of all religious orators of any ) 
age, who would have been made Bishop of Antioch at 
twenty-three but for his generous support of Basil ; 
who as Patriarch of Constantinople joined absolute 
simplicity and charity of living with steady defiance 
of court power and an electric eloquence that rings in 
his pages vivid and alive to-day ; who in perfect 
serenity and sweetness of soul blessed God for his 
rod of chastisement, while he lay dying on the road 
under the barbarous cruelty that dragged him in age 
and infirmities into banishment. 

In this group of brilliant and saintly names we 
notice, first, that they are all near friends, and two 
of them brothers ; and next, their short career, the 
oldest living only to sixty-three, while the one who 
passed into history as " great " died at fifty. They all 
represent the very best of those qualities which seem 
the family traits, so to speak, of Eastern Christianity. 
It would be hard to find, in the writings of either of s 
them, a trace of sectarian rancor, or personal vindic- 
tiveness, or spiritual pride, or dogmatic bigotry, or self- 
ish ambition, or vanity of letters. All were humble- 
minded and devout, ascetic in their training, austere 
judges of themselves, utterly submissive to the Di- 
vine will they worshipped. The strongest impression 
one gets from their writings is their absolute lack of 
self-reference or self-assertion, and the entire good 
faith with which they not only assume that the 
ascetic life is the true moral ideal, but make its rule 
the law of conscience for themselves — the rule of 
personal purity and rigid self-denial. 



192 CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST. 

But for a certain simplicity of courage, and a child- 
like fearlessness, we might possibly miss in them the 
more masculine virtues we lo^k for in the religious 
character. When Basil was threatened with confis- 
cation, imprisonment, and death, his reply was, " Not 
one of these things touches me. He who has no 
goods cannot suffer any loss. He who is God's guest 
cannot be an exile anywhere. For martyrdom I am 
unworthy ; but death is only a friend to me, to bring 
me sooner to God." 

All were lovers of nature, and lovers of what was 
beautiful in Greek art and letters. Their writings 
have all become Christian classics, and have had 
their share in preserving the marvellous vitality of 
the Greek tongue : a vitality so great, that it has not 
only been kept alive in the debased Bomaic ; but in 
our own day Schliemann, as he tells us, has moved a 
village audience in Ithaca to tears by reciting out of 
Homer the meeting of Ulysses and Penelope, while 
Xenophon and Demosthenes are used as reading- 
books in Athenian public schools to-day. That the 
classic Greek is still so nearly the language of the 
people as to be almost intelligible, easily mastered 
by a few weeks' study, and rather gaining upon the 
modern in current employ, is greatly due to its uses 
as a sacred tongue, and to those writers whose ora- 
tions and commentaries have further consecrated it 
to that use. 

We notice, too, that this era of oratorical splendor 
and religious fame immediately follows the great con- 
troversy, and that it belongs wholly to the defenders 
of what was then called Orthodoxy. This fact has a 



JUSTINIAN. 193 

certain value in the history of polemics as a phase of 
human thought. It shows, not that their speculation 
was more true, or their reasoning more honest, but 
that they chose the side which best expressed the 
warmth of devoted, unreasoning, and loyal faith. 

II. The nearly forty years' reign of Justinian (527- 
565) is very famous in history for two things; — 
victory over the Yandals by Belisarius and over the 
Goths by Narses, which seemed likely to make the 
Empire whole again by reconquest of the West ; and 
the codifying of Eoman Law, which became a most 
important element in the later civilization. Besides 
these were certain marked merits of administration. 
Justinian, says Sismondi, first made economy a sci- 
ence, and systematically encouraged industry. The 
silk-worm was brought by travelling monks from 
India ; trade was carried as far as China. The mag- 
nificent dome of Santa Sophia testifies to this day 
how the piety and splendor of the capital were cared 
for in the imperial policy. 

Justinian himself has only the accidental glory of 
these achievements. His greatest general died under 
his unjust and cruel jealousy ; and his chief merit 
is perhaps the steady and generous support he gave to 
the great jurists who labored on the Code. He was 
himself an ascetic, a scholastic, and a pedant, " neither 
beloved in his life," says Gibbon, "nor regretted at 
his death"; busying himself with theological disputes, 
in which he showed neither a schoolman's subtilty 
nor a statesman's skill ; ruled by the strange, fascinat- 
ing adventuress Theodora, whose name is shaded with 
the blackest ignominy or else the blackest calumny, 



194 CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST. 

who upheld her half-way heresy in the face of his 
ostentatious orthodoxy, and left her memory to the 
mercy of bigots who never pardon or forget. 

The brief revival which this reign offers of impe- 
rial magnificence is darkened by its almost unpar- 
alleled calamities. War against the barbarian means 
extermination, or, at its mildest, devastation. The 
Vandal Gelimer surrendered, when he saw a morsel 
of half-burnt dough snatched from between his neph- 
ew's very teeth by a Moorish boy, — a type of the 
ruin that spread through Italy and Africa. A glar- 
ing comet amid these disasters seemed the scourge 
of God hung visibly in the sky. An earthquake de- 
stroyed, it is said, two hundred thousand lives in a 
single city. A dreadful pestilence (bred, say the an- 
nalists, from the bodies of reptiles left by a great 
inundation of the Tiber) raged more than fifty years, 
leaving hardly a spot or man untouched. At Justin- 
ian's death, it has been reckoned, the population of the 
Empire had been diminished (since Augustus, proba- 
bly) by a hundred million lives. 

The decision at Chalcedon (451) had settled the 
standard of orthodoxy for the West, but had only 
heated the jealousies between Antioch and Alexan- 
dria. The partisans of a single nature in Christ never 
failed to make points, or split them, that would make 
against the accepted creed ; and numberless shades of 
the " Monophysite heresy " prevailed, till these flick- 
ering contests paled in the glare of Saracen invasion. 
A compromise — the famous Henoticon — carefully 
framed (482) to exclude the sharper lines of division, 
had not long satisfied either party, since each had to 



MONOPHYSITE AND MONOTHELETE. 195 

sacrifice the prominence of its favorite dogma. 
Justinian, in his desire to propitiate the more hereti- 
cal sect, published a " confession," which went as far 
as this: "Whosoever does not confess that our Lord 
Jesus Christ, crucified in the flesh, is true God and 
Lord of glory, and one of the Holy Trinity, let such a 
one be anathema"; and declared the body of Christ 
incorruptible. They, on their part, admitted that, 
while there is in Christ but one nature, yet that 
nature is twofold : their test phrase was, that " God 
was crucified." 

These, with some obscure matters charged as heresy 
against the Origenists, were the delicate differences 
to be arranged at another Council in Constantinople 
(553), which willingly enough accepted the very 
words of the Emperor's confession. But after his 
death dissensions went on widening, with admixture 
of strange travesties here and there, that seemed to 
make a fourth divinity of Mary " Mother of God," till 
all were swept away in a common ruin by the impla- 
cable storm of Islamism. The last attempt to recon- 
cile them was in the compromise (suggested 633) that, 
though there were two natures in Christ, yet there 
was only a single will. This seemed to satisfy for a 
time, but was brought to an end by the sixth great 
Council (680), which established as orthodox the doc- 
trine of two wills. The Monotheletes, including the 
Emperor himself, who had proposed the compromise, 
were now denounced, and " peace," says Gieseler, drily, 
" was thus restored to the Church." 

This pitiful story seems fairly enough the logical 
outcome of the attempt to stake man's faith on accu- 



196 CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST. 

racy of belief. Assuming that it is to be so, the nat- 
ural inference surely is, that no degree of accuracy can 
be excessive, and no difference of belief too small to 
justify intolerant debate. To absolute sceptical in- 
difference, the distinction of two natures and two 
wills is not more insignificant than the act of casting 
incense on a pagan chafing-dish, — the test which had 
determined many an heroic martyr-death. One, how- 
ever, is a point of speculative opinion ; the other, how- 
ever slight, an act of free choice. One deals with, logic 
merely; the other with the conscience, where the 
foundation of moral life is. One is dogmatic ortho- 
doxy, the other is spiritual integrity. The orthodox 
postulate, that rightness of belief is essential to sal- 
vation, could not have been more perfectly carried 
out to its logical absurdity, than in these incessant, 
unintelligible, disastrous controversies, that cost the 
Eastern Church its last chance of vigorous life. 

III. The third phase of Eastern Christianity to be 
recalled here is the extraordinary outburst of fanati- 
cism called the Image Controversy, lasting more than 
a hundred years, and shaking the Empire to its cen- 
tre. This need not detain us long. It broke out 
something more than a hundred years after the furi- 
ous assault on Arabian tribal idolatry led by Mahomet. 
The attack on Christian images began, in fact, with 
the intolerant Mussulman fanaticism itself, which ex- 
pelled all " idols " from the churches where it had 
power through its rapid conquests in the East, es- 
pecially in Syria, to the despair of Christian and the 
vindictive delight of Jew. 

The Emperor Leo III. (the Isaurian) was the first 



IMAGE CONTROVERSY. 197 

"Iconoclast" of the Empire (718-741). He was a 
man of military vigor, political good sense, and reso- 
lute courage, one of the ablest and best of Byzantine 
emperors. Image- worship had run to a violent su- 
perstition, which worshipped statues of saints and mi- 
raculous pictures, — such as that of the Virgin Mary 
at Sozopolis, whose hand flowed with balsam, as well 
as the visible symbol of the Cross, at which no one 
scrupled. Images were taken from the churches by 
command of Leo, and a council called by his successor 
• (754) echoed in its Acts the imperial will, holding it 
especially profane that she who was " literally and 
truly Mother of God, higher than the whole creation, 
visible or invisible," should be represented by "'a 
figure out of any sort of wood, or colors laid on by a 
workman's hand." 

It is unnecessary to tell the furious resistance to 
such decrees, amounting to rebellion and civil war ; 
or how the fanaticism was fed by companies of monks, 
and traded on by interested churchmen. By an odd 
and childlike superstition, not only prayers were said 
and offerings made to painted images, and lighted 
candles set before them ; but the sacred bread, " the 
body of the Lord," was put in their hands^as children 
feed their dolls, and the color scraped from them was 
mixed in the cup of communion. Some councils or 
synods were found to sanction the custom of image- 
worship. Imperial edicts against it were passed in 
vain. Silent toleration and persecuting rigor were 
tried in turn ; till, under a second Theodora (842), full 
sanction of Church and State was given to the custom, 
and a yearly festival was established to celebrate its 



198 CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST. 

final triumph. What quaint, abject, homely forms 
the superstition took, is told us by all visitors to 
Oriental churches at the present day. The dispute 
was finally settled by the curious compromise which 
permitted pictures (or colored medallions), but not 
images, while the Latin Church admits them both, 
— another -rift of the breach between East and West 
that went on widening hopelessly. Since this sepa- 
ration,* the Eastern Church drifts out of the main 
channels of history, and floats, in a certain idle and 
sheltered way, in such shallows and coves as the 
floods of fanaticism or conquest may have spared. Its 
history will not detain us any longer. 

To us the strange thing, the real tragedy in all 
these disorders, — so puerile and futile the cause of 
them appears to us, — is that they were the serious 
and real interests of Eastern Christians, while the 
storm was gathering in the South that soon swept 
them to horrible destruction. We cannot watch with 
their eyes the advancing tempest, or know how it 
looked to them, because their eyes were holden, not 
to see things as they were. An infatuation of secu- 
rity possessed them, I suppose, in the august name 
and traditions of the Empire, till the sweep of Ma- 
hometan fanaticism had grown irresistible. Eor, in 
the year 609, the Arab camel-driver Mahomet, in a 
brooding, fitful way that we might take for mania, 
had begun to talk of himself as a prophet of the One 

* This was made final in 879, at a council in Constantinople, 
which rejected, — 1. The Roman assertion of supremacy ; 2. The 
claim that Bulgaria lay within the see of Rome ; 3. The addition 
of the phrase Jilioque to the Western creed. 



MAHOMET. 199 

God. In 622 he fled for his life from Mecca, and 
began to gather a force personally devoted to him. 
In ten years more he died, just on the edge of an 
enterprise that blazed out suddenly, like a conflagra- 
tion. Syria, Egypt, Persia, were by 650 held by the 
Moslem sword, and along the confines of the Empire 
the Crescent bore hard against the Cross. 

I am not to repeat, in ever so rapid outline, the 
story of those conquests, or discuss again the charac- 
ter and career of the Arabian prophet. We have only 
•to look, very briefly, at the moral causes at work in 
the sudden catastrophe. By common opinion, Ma- 
homet is regarded now as more reformer than im- 
postor, as a fanatic if ever there was one, partially 
(perhaps) insane. At least the frenzy that we call 
madness is often the most effective appeal to Oriental 
races, and it was strong in him at times. Still, it 
was not only vehement passion, often on the edge of 
insanity. However distorted, it never quite lost the 
glow of religious feeling and moral passion it started 
with. He is said to have picked up very early in 
life some crude notion of Christian doctrine from cer- 
tain Ebionitish sects, heretical and zealously mono- 
theist ; while his most indignant scorn was called 
out by some monkish travesties of the trinity, already 
alluded to. His career began with a furious attack 
on the idols of the Arab Kaabah, and this iconoclastic 
zeal he never abandoned. Indeed, among his followers 
it is as hot and intolerant to-day as it was in the first 
onslaught inspired by his voice. 

A word of the field where this new fanaticism took 
root, and the material on which it fed. To the most 



200 CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST. 

religious races on earth Arabia itself is a holy land. 
There is Mount Sinai, its rugged summit scorched by 
the visible presence of Jehovah ; the rock, where at 
the stroke of Moses water gushed out for his fainting 
people ; the well Zemzem, which the angel showed to 
Hagar when Ishmael, father of the desert tribes, was 
dying of thirst ; the black stone of Mecca, chief visi- 
ble object of adoration to the faithful, which they say 
fell from heaven. The Arab, we are told, claims a 
license to plunder all other tribes of men, in retalia- 
tion for Abraham's casting off of Ishmael. Whatever 
the ground of it, the license is one all travellers feel 
to-day. 

On them, again, God has bestowed four peculiar 
gifts : turbans for diadems, tents for walls and houses, 
swords for intrenchments, and poems for laws. In 
their worship they* allow no images or pictures : 
" Thank God," say they, " we have originals." The 
same enormous conceit glorifies their Sacred Book. 
No mortal man, they think, unless inspired, could 
wield the vast fabric of their language, swollen with 
unnumbered synonymes, having eighty names for 
honey, two hundred for a serpent, a thousand for a 
sword. Mahomet had never learned to read or write ; 
yet the revelations he gave out from time to time are 
held unrivalled by all poets or orators of that tongue : 
" the greatest of miracles, equally stupendous with 
the act of raising the dead, alone enough to convince 
the world of its divine original." 

No other creed has so worked up into a fanatic 
passion the obscure feeling which lies at the heart 
of most men, that their lives are ordered by a Destiny 



STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS OF ISLAM. 201 

wholly out of their control. The Moslem faith teaches 
that the day and hour of each man's death is written 
down in the book of fate. .JSTo power can avert or. 
alter that His freedom is only to choose the 
worthiest way to die. Those who fall in battle would 
have perished all the same, about their business or in 
bed at home ; but basely so, most gloriously now. 
It is their great privilege to have fallen so ; already 
they are in the joys of paradise. Thus fatalism is not 
the helpless spell upon the will it might be in a fee- 
bler race, but a passion of absolute daring. " Islam," 
Submission ; " Kismet," It is so decreed, — are the 
watchwords both of that fierce courage in battle and 
that helpless stupor in defeat or misery, alike charac- 
teristic of the Moslem temper. 

Both the strength and the impotence of Islamism 
consist in its having drawn off all the moral forces of 
the nature into that one channel, of a blind religious 
frenzy ; in its absolute scorn of all civilized arts, its 
absolute surrender to the sensual delights of civilized 
luxury. The conqueror Omar (637) lay on the stone 
steps where beggars slept ; the staff he leaned on was 
his bow ; all his equipage, as he rode his one camel to 
the shrine at Jerusalem was a sack of wheat, a basket 
of dates, a wooden platter, and a water-skin. "When 
Mustapha, ten and a half centuries later (1683), lay 
in his camp before Vienna, it was with pavilions of 
green silk and all the luxuries that could be gathered 
by an enormous army train, till this insolent array 
was swept back by the splendid chivalry of Sobieski, 
and Europe was saved. From that hour the formi- 
dable wave of Mahometan conquest has ebbed, stead- 
9* 



202 CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST. 

ily or fitfully, till the power which Luther thought 
likely to bring the reign of Antichrist is hardly 
propped from falling by Christian alliances. England 
and Eussia, not Arabia or Turkey, control the desti- 
nies of the East. ■ 

But, in its first fury, it had nearly extinguished 
the degenerate Christian Empire. Twice Constanti- 
nople w T as beset by an Arab fleet, — in 668 and 716 ; 
and twice it was saved by the timely and terrible 
defence of the unquenchable Greek fire, — floods of 
blazing petroleum mixed with sulphur poured over 
the surface of the waves. Meanwhile the invasion 
spread westward, through Egypt; through the dis- 
tracted states of North Africa, where it crushed at 
once Greek and Vandal, and both the rival parties in 
the Church ; into the Gothic kingdom of Spain, where 
it won almost the whole Peninsula, but was pushed 
back by a religious passion equal to its own, and 
driven out at length by Ferdinand and Isabella ; across 
the Pyrenees into Prance, where at Tours, in 732, the 
light horse of Abdelrahman broke all day long against 
the steel-clad line of Charles Martel, like surf against 
a belt of ice. The Arab host, when night fell, " folded 
their tents and silently stole away." 

This set the western limit of Saracen invasion. 
"For," says the chronicler, "as the hammer breaks 
and bruises iron and steel and all other metals, so did 
Charles bruise and break in battle all these foes and 
strange nations." The Arabs, as ever submissive to 
their destiny, call that fatal field " the martyrs' pave- 
ment " ; and to this day, say they, the sound is heard 
which the angels of heaven make in so holy a place, 
to call the faithful unto prayer. 



THE FAILURE OF ISLAM. 203 

And thus the flood, which at one time looked irre- 
sistible, was beaten back, both in East and West. 
The great Saracen Empire, which once threatened to 
envelop the whole of Christendom, still touches it at 
both ends of its broken crescent, reaching nearly half 
way round the Mediterranean. As far as the strength 
of merely religious passion goes, that power was well 
matched against its antagonist, and was perhaps even 
its superior. Bat the bleak monotheism of Islam, its 
sombre fatalism, its fanatical pride, its ferocious cru- 
elty, its gorgeous and fitful luxury, never were allied 
— except for one brief holiday of splendor at Cor- 
dova — with the great intellectual forces, never with 
the sober and resolute temper and the moral will,. 
which make religion deep and real, and are alone 
competent to the world's best work. 

Mahometanism broods upon its departed glories. 
It keeps alive, as its one root of strength, its blind and 
intolerant fanaticism. It is the creed of perhaps the 
most recklessly daring fighters in the world. In 
winning the inferior races, and training them to a 
fervent worship of its own and a certain low level of 
culture, it has shown an aptness, skill, and zeal quite 
in advance of any Christian missions. But science 
it treats with ignorant scorn. The arts of modern 
life it takes at second hand, choosing always those of 
mere luxury or else mere destruction. And so it has 
no hold upon the future, only the memory of a bloody 
and stormy past. 



o 



X. 
CONVERSION OE THE BARBARIANS. 

~N"E of the most familiar of religious images is 
that which figures the Christian movement as 
a Warfare. The body of believers is likened to an 
Army — in the temper of its service, the aim of its 
movement, the symbol of its loyalty, in its discipline, 
drill, and organization. A favorite Christian phrase 
has always been " the Church militant " ; and many 
illustrations have already shown what meaning, and 
how much, lies in that phrase : that it means, not 
simply that the religious life is a warfare to us indi- 
vidually, which in one view it always is ; but that, in 
its largest sense, it is a movement of conflict and an- 
tagonism, against very definite foes, and to certain 
definite ends. This image we must still keep in view 
a little longer. 

How in its nobler sense that warfare was carried on 
for some centuries, and by what sort of men, we have 
seen already. We have now to consider it, in its 
largest sense hitherto, as an invasion and a conquest. 
We are to think of it as a Campaign, intricate in its 
plan, wide in its field of operations, long in the carry- 
ing out, conducted by wary and skilful strategy, and 
brought to its close with a diplomacy equally adroit 
and able. No other terms than these will fitly express 



A THREE CENTURIES' CAMPAIGN. 205 

the intricate character, the mingled motives, the variety 
of agents, the acts sometimes heroic and then again 
quite questionable, by which that campaign was car- 
ried through. 

Indeed, these only express it feebly. For the field 
includes all Western Europe, — that is, the entire front 
of the advancing civilization. The time it covers is 
three centuries. Its strategy is the steady policy of 
the Church of Eome, administered by a long succession 
of able and zealous pontiffs. Its agents are not only 
that great host of devoted servants, numbering many 
thousands, of whose discipline and zeal we have seen 
something already in the monastic orders ; they in- 
clude also barbarian chiefs and petty sovereigns, whose 
policies, feuds, and even crimes are, with the heat 
of fresh conversion, put at the service of the Church. 
It is of this vast campaign that I am to attempt, not a 
history, or outline, or even sketch, but only to hint 
the nature of the forces that guided, impelled, and 
fought it. 

The three centuries just spoken of may be most 
conveniently regarded as extending from the time of 
Leo the Great, about 450, to the death of St. Boni- 
face, Apostle of the Germans, in 755. Just midway 
stands the remarkable and imposing figure of Gregory 
the Great, — sometimes called the last of the Fathers, 
and the real dividing-mark between the ancient and 
middle age, — who died in G04. He may be held to 
have first distinctly conceived this great work from 
the point of view just indicated, and, more than any 
other man, to have given it the impulse and the 
stamp of his powerful moral nature. At his noble 



206 CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS. 

personal character we may glance briefly by and by. 
At present, we have simply to fix this period of time 
as a whole as definitely as may be, — its beginning, 
middle, and end. Its beginning corresponds nearly 
with the fall of the Western Empire ; its end is a lit- 
tle before the refounding of that Empire in the person 
of Charlemagne. 

Eecall now those words of Leo, in which he recites 
the glory God had bestowed on Eome in making it 
the seat of military -empire, as a preparation for the 
greater glory that would belong to it as head of a 
spiritual dominion broad as the earth itself. Those 
words may serve as a key to the movement we are 
about to consider, the Christian conquest of the bar- 
barian nations. 

But it may be worth while to reflect a moment on 
the amazing realization of them which we have before 
our eyes at the end of more than fourteen centuries. 
Imperial Eome never had at its command so vast a 
number of subjects, nor such absolute devotion, nor such 
diplomatic skill, nor such willing obedience, nor such 
wealth of voluntary gifts, nor such hold on the imagi- 
nation and reverence of men, as Papal Eome, stripped 
of the last vestige of temporal power, has to-day. 
What no mere secular government can do, it can 
command men to he martyrs. Its word is a spell of 
authority as much in the heart of Africa or on the 
Pacific coast as in the chambers of the Vatican. It 
can by a whisper raise or quell a religious frenzy in 
Paris, Vienna, San Francisco, or Quebec. It can 
block the wheels of the strongest military power that 
ever existed on earth, and does it to-day. It claims 



MILITARY EMPIRE OF ROME. 207 

to hold, alone, the key to the great social problem, the 
despair of moralists and statesmen, and with it to con- 
trol the next great step of human evolution. 

"We may deny that claim ; we may hate, dread, or 
defy the authority which still asserts itself in so many 
ways. The one thing we cannot do is to despise it. 
And amoog all matters of historical inquiry the one 
that seems best worth our understanding, if we can, is 
the course of events that laid the foundations of that 
power so deep and strong. Some of the conditions of 
its exercise we shall have to consider when we come 
to speak of the mediaaval Empire-Church. Just now 
we deal only with the period of its foundation. 

The military empire of Eome was about five hun- 
dred years * in coming to its greatest breadth and 
height. This was a process of conquest carried out 
by the patriotic valor of the Eoman armies, and 
guided by the vigorous policy — often kept in check 
by the jealous dread — of the Eoman Senate. Again 
and again conquests were undertaken reluctantly, and 
carried out in self-defence, exactly as they are by 
England in Asia and Africa to-day. . In particular, 
Eome was obliged to resist steadily, for two or three 
centuries, the steady advance of barbarian tribes, in 
that movement which threatened to cover as with a 
flood the whole field of ancient civilization. She was 
obliged to conquer, exterminate, enslave them ; to 
draft them in her armies ; to keep them in check by 
military colonies ; to adopt them in her political sys- 
tem ; to humor and tolerate their religions ; to give 

* Counting from the invasion of the Gauls (b. c. 390) to the 
time of Trajan, 



208 CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS. 

them whatever share and stake was possible in the 
wealth, art, skill, at her command. All her treasures 
of military skill, of population, of state-craft, had been 
spent in that struggle — with diminishing strength at 
last, and vanishing hope ; and now the end had plainly 
come. The Barbarian was master of the civilized 
world, and all its treasures were at his feet. 

We need not go at any length into the vast tragedy 
of the Fall of Kome. It is with a single point only 
of its historical significance that we have to do. 'Just 
at this moment of time — the final collapse of the 
ancient system — the vast conception came, like a 
flash of genius as it were, upon such minds as Leo's, 
to win back all that was lost, and more, but in another 
way. Pagan Borne had attempted the conquest of 
the barbarian world, and had failed. Christian Borne 
should undertake to conquer the soul of Barbarism itself y 
and in God's name would do it. Such was the mag- 
nificent conception of Leo, of Gregory, of the English 
Winfried surnamed Boniface. Not only the thought 
itself was more amazing and grand than had ever 
dawned on the mind of general or statesman. The 
means by which it was carried out show a larger 
political grasp, a more consummate generalship, a 
steadier courage, a reach and subtilty of resource, a 
firmness of policy, to which the perishing Empire had 
shown no parallel. 

The weapons of this warfare, too, were as original 
as its conception was great and new. They were, in 
the most literal, even tender and pathetic sense, the 
weapons of Christian love. The barbarian world must 
be won, if at all, by way of sympathy. It must be 



OUTSIDE VIEW OF THE BARBARIAN. 209 

conquered through its imagination, conscience, and 
religious awe. The men who went out to that con- 
quest must go animated and haunted with a great 
yearning for saving souls. The power with which 
they were clothed was the power of poverty, austerity, 
obedience, and self-denial. 

I do not use these words at random. Volumes of 
the correspondence of these men have come down to 
us, and they show the qualities I have named on 
every page. They show, too, an incredible patience 
of detail ; — such as we might vaguely imagine to be 
needful if we try to shape out in our minds the con- 
ditions of the task ; but such as we could not defi- 
nitely conceive without those innumerable strange, 
quaint, touching illustrations. I may attempt pres- 
ently to restore a line or two of these faded memo- 
ries ; but first we should try to see a little more 
distinctly the outside aspect of the case. 

There is a brief bright picture in one of Chryso- 
stom's homilies, of the barbarian as he appeared in the 
market-place of Constantinople, — restless, turbulent, 
curious, bearded, thrusting at passers-by with the 
stick he carries, tossing back his shock of hair " more 
like a lion than a man." This is just before the great 
real terror of the Gothic name. St. Jerome reflects, 
from his convent in Bethlehem, the far-off vision of 
the agony at the sack of Eome by Alaric, and the 
haggard spectacle of vagrant, hungry, despairing troops 
of men and women, high-born, delicately bred, used 
to luxury, stripped of everything in that great deso- 
lation. " I cannot see it without tears,'' he says ; 
" that power of old, and wealth unknown, have come 



210 CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS. 

to such need as to lack roof, food, and clothing ; and 
still the hard and cruel heart of some men is not 
softened : nay, they rip up their wretched rags and 
wallets, to find gold among these poor captives." * 

The monk Salvian, a few years later, had watched 
in Gaul or Spain the Gothic and Vandal tide, wave 
upon wave, and set himself to a serious study of bar- 
barian frankness, simplicity, courage, ferocity, or craft, 
compared with the various forms of civilized vice 
generated in the corruption of Pagan society; and 'finds 
the new rude population at least as hopeful subjects 
for conversion as the old, which it justly displaced. 
St. Augustine about the same time recites, in phrase 
that I have before cited, the judgment of God in the 
overthrow of that evil world. The dainty Sidonius 
Apollinaris, writing from Toulouse (about 455), tells 
jestingly of his seven-foot Gothic hosts (too big for 
his hexameters), greased with rancid butter, reeking 
of onion and garlic, and clad in shabby kilt and tar- 
tan, f A little later, Jornandes gives, with the vivid- 
ness of an eye-witness who had felt its terror, the 
sketch which all historians since have copied, of the 
hardly human Huns — more brutes than men, cling- 
ing like cats to the backs of the horses they scarce 
ever left, with strange flat-nosed Mongol visages and 
beaded gimlet-holes (as it were) in place of eyes — 
who poured on like the flood and were swept back like 
the ebb, but threatened at one time to put all Eu- 
rope under the yoke of Asia. 

* Introduction to the Commentary on Ezekiel. 
t So St. Sturmi, exploring the wilderness for Boniface, smells 
the evil odor of the barbarians afar off. 



GREGORY OF TOURS. 211 

These are hints of the preliminary studies, sketches 
of the field of operations, before the serious campaign 
began. Of the century of wreck and waste that fol- 
lowed, in the wake of Lombard and Frank invasion, 
we have, a full-length picture, grotesque in the sim- 
plicity with which its horrors are drawn out, in the 
pages of the excellent and pious Gregory, Bishop of 
Tours, who bravely and patiently held his post in the 
midst of them.* A single family group, taken from 
his sketches and told in meagre outline, will help 
us more, perhaps, than any generalization of them. 

Clovis,f king of the Franks, had been converted 
by his Burgundian bride Clotilda, and baptized by 
St. Eemigius, who spoke to him the brave words, 
" Meekly bow thy neck, Sicambrian ; adore what thou 
hast burned, burn what thou hast adored." He was 
of the true faith, and impartially destroyed both 
Pagan Alleman and Arian Burgundian or Goth. J 
" God overthrew his enemies daily under his hand,'' 
says Gregory, " because he walked with an upright 
heart before him, and did that which was pleasing in 

* These have been condensed by Augustin Thierry in his six 
brief and curious " Tales of the Merovingian Times." 

t Barbaric, Chlodovig ; softened in lapse of time to Louis. 

% The destruction of the premature but brilliant Arian civiliza- 
tion of the Goths and Burgundians — assailed by the conquests of 
Belisarius on one side, and crushed by the brutality of the Franks 
on the other — is one of the obscurer tragedies of this evil time. 
Some features of this civilization will be found hinted at below, 
under the title " The Christian Schools." It is pathetic to read the 
warning given (in the correspondence of Cassiodorus) by the great 
Ostrogothic King Theodoric to the young Alaric of Toulouse, the 
Visigoth, to beware of the quarrel with the Franks, in which, a 
few years later, his kingdom perished. 



212 CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS. 

his eyes." And he adds, a little further on, that, 
" having slain many other princes, yea, his own nearest 
kindred, of whom he had jealousy lest they should 
take the kingdom from him, he extended his power 
through all Gaul. And once having called together 
his people, he is said to have spoken thus concerning 
the kinsmen whom he had slain : ' Woe is me, who 
remain as a pilgrim among strangers, and have no 
kindred, who if adversity should come might give me 
help.' This he said," adds Gregory, quaintly, *" not 
grieving at their death, but by craft, if perchance he 
might find any still remaining whom he might put 
to death." 

His son Clotaire was of the same barbarian temper, 
his many murders and many wives alike the scandal 
of his Christian profession. One of his queens, 
Eadegonda, whose father and brother he had killed 
in war, escaped with some hazard and became a con- 
secrated nun, founding with her dower a convent of 
some celebrity, where with her friend, the poet Fortu- 
natus, she found repose, — a little island of peace 
amidst the tumultuous inundation. The last act of 
Clotaire's brutality was to fasten in a hut and burn 
alive on some suspicion his son Chramnes, with all 
his family ; after which, at the tomb of St. Martin, 
he confessed " all the acts which perchance he had 
done amiss, imploring with deep groans that the 
blessed saint w T ould beseech the Lord's mercy for his 
sins, and wash out by his intercession whatever he 
had unreasonably done." " What a heavenly Lord is 
this," he said when dying with fever, " who so destroys 
mighty kings ! " 



THE BARBARIAN FRANKS. 213 

Of the sons of Clotaire, Gontran " the good " was 
held (says Sismoodi) " to be a man of humane tem- 
per ; for, excepting his wife's physician, whom he cut 
in pieces for failing to cure her, two of his brothers- 
in-law whom he assassinated, and another whom he 
treacherously slew, there is hardly any cruel act 
recorded of him, except it be his destroying the city 
of Cominges, and slaughtering all the inhabitants, 
men, women, and children." He was, moreover, a 
strong friend 'of the monks and clergy, founded sev- 
' eral monasteries, and paid liberally for the expiatory 
rites that would give his soul repose. 

A great part of the tale is taken up with the jeal- 
ousies, treacheries, and ambitions of the two barbarian 
> queens, Fredegond and Brunehild, — more famous far 
than the two brothers whose wives they were, — with 
the intrigues and murders that grew out of them. 
But both were zealous champions of orthodoxy. 
Fredegond spared no cost to purchase ransom for the 
souls of her hired assassins, if they should fall ; and 
Brunehild — who was tied to a wild horse in her old 
age, and so torn to pieces — was a correspondent and 
friend of Gregory the Great, and a stanch supporter 
of his scheme for the conversion of the Saxons. 

Such allies as these, for better or worse, the Church 
had found in its campaign against barbarian pagan- 
ism and Arian heresy; just as half-pagan Frankish 
chiefs like Charles Martel sought the alliance of 
churchmen like Boniface against the wilder floods 
that still beat upon their frontier. The service was 
mutual, and each party was largely independent of 
the other. Often, indeed, the Church could only give 



214 CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS. 

a Christian name, without changing the thing. Tims 
Gregory the Great thinks it necessary to spare them 
the old pagan temples, only sprinkling them with 
holy water, and putting saints' relics in place of idols ; 
and to adopt their old festivals, as Yule and Easter, 
under new associations. 

Many and strange were the scandals that came of 
these conversions. " Here I have been baptized more 
than twenty times," said an old man one day, when 
the crowd was larger than usual, and the baptismal 
robes gave out, " and every time they have given me 
most beautiful clothes. These old rags to-day are 
hardly fit for a ploughboy, not to say a warrior like 
me." One new convert takes the opportunity to 
pick the priest's pocket while the water is preparing 
for his baptism. One proposes that a point of her- 
esy shall be settled, not by " these long talks," but 
promptly, by the ordeal of boiling water. " Is it 
true," asks a barbarian chief, his foot already in the 
sacred font, " that my ancestors the noble Frisians 
are in hell ? " " Doubtless," replies the priest ; " they 
died without the only saving faith." " Then " — draw- 
ing back his foot — "I will not quit those brave men 
to join the cowards of your paradise. We will follow 
the ways of our fathers." And so, in comforting 
vision, the priest soon after beheld the defiant chief 
among his ancestors in the fiery pit. 

It is a fair question to ask what such conversions 
were really worth. To this the answer is, that the 
first point was to bring those fierce tribes, in name at 
least, within the Christian pale, and to substitute the 
Christian for the pagan ideal. Everything was staked 



SAINT COLUMBAN. 215 

on the success with which this preliminary work was 
done. The hope of the world lay in those rude men ; 
and their instructors felt it in a way which they pos- 
sibly could not have explained to us so well as we 
can understand it for them. Take the breadth of 
modern thought and life, — science, enterprise, art, 
wealth, power, — and set it against anything that 
could possibly have grown from the degenerate Greek 
or Eoman stock ; and you measure in p.art the service 
that was done, when that rude vigor was grafted with 
the shoot of a finer life, which would in time yield 
such infinitely richer fruit. 

Or, again, look away from the vague idealities 
which are apt to fill the field of history to what the 
Christian monks, scattered by tens of thousands all 
through the great wilderness of barbarism, were ac- 
tually doing there : the infinite serious patience with 
which they went about their task ; the austerities of 
the self-denial that trained them for it, and kept its 
ideal from fading in them ; the hints of beastly and 
violent ways which they attempted to keep in check ; 
the strange power of fascination which these very 
austerities exercised, to attract men to them. St. Co- 
lumban establishes his post alone in the hill-country 
near the Ehine, because the rule of Benedict is not 
sufficiently austere ; and the more rigid the lines he 
draws, the more men press to enter them.* This 

* A brother who does not say Amen after grace must he pun- 
ished with six stripes ; who neglects to cross himself after bless- 
ing, twelve stripes ; who does not check a cough in reciting the 
Psalm, or dents the sacramental cup with his teeth, six stripes ; 
who appeals from judgment to his superior, forty days' penance on 
bread and water. A lay brother who gets drunk, or is sick from 



216 CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS. 

earth, says Columban, is non vita sed via, "not a life, 
but a way," and to transgressors he made it very 
hard. 

I have said before that some of those men were mar- 
tyrs for humanity. St. Pretextatus, who had bravely 
sheltered his godson Merovig, is assassinated in his 
own church by Fredegond's order. St. Wandregisil 
keeps an angry mob at bay with pious words, and 
will not appeal to any arm of flesh. St. Bavon hum- 
bles himself in remorse before a slave he has once 
owned, and for penance compels him to shave his 
head, beat him with rods, and shut him up in prison. 
St. Germanus strips himself to the shirt to clothe a 
shivering beggar, and beggars himself to ransom cap- 
tives. St. Sequanus goes out to live in a savage 
wood inhabited by more savage men. " No sooner 
did they see him, than from wolves they became 
lambs ; from such as but now were a source of ter- 
ror, they were thenceforth ministers of help ; and 
what had been a resort of cruel demons and robbers 
became the abode of innocence and Virtue." Such 
tales as these, with many a miracle and wonder in- 
terspersed, and enforced by many a Christian honrily, 
and seasoned by many a*- subtile theological debate, 
came (says Guizot) to be the mental diversion and 
the moral instruction of whole populations, — their 
Arabian Nights, their popular novel, their sermon 
and essay, their daily newspaper. 

Yes, the hope of the world lay in those rude men. 
The future of humanity was staked upon such tasks 

greediness, seven days' bread and water; who eats or drinks in 
honor of pagan idols, three years of such penance. 



GREGORY THE GREAT. 217 

as those which attempted their conversion. When 
Gregory the Great was yet a simple monk, — so each 
of his biographers delights to repeat the tale, — he 
saw in the market-place at Eome some captive Anglo- 
Saxon boys, ruddy-faced, golden-haired, such as we 
often see in the streets, and as the Italian painters 
(Goethe says) take for their type of cherubs. Learn- 
ing who they were, Non Angli sed angdi was his 
famous reply, — "Not Angles but angels"; and from 
that hour he set his heart on their conversion. Now 
the Saxons were rudest and fiercest of all the bar- 
barous tribes ; and since their conquest of England, 
near a century and a half before, — when they over- 
threw the legendary realm of King Arthur, and drove 
back the Christian Britons to the mountains of Wales 
and the Western Isles, — had remained obstinately 
Pagan. All English histories tell the story of Au- 
gustine of Canterbury and his forty monks, sent by 
Gregory (597), and their conversion of the Saxon ; 
and in Gregory's letters you may read how persist- 
ently and hopefully he followed them up, when they 
shrank from the terror of the unknown journey* 
This was amid the very ferocity of the " Merovingian 
times " before described. Their protector on the way 
was the truculent Brunehild; and the act was one 
which, more than any other, marks Gregory as the 
head and chief in this long unbloody crusade. 

Gregory is one of those men who are heroic from 
the steady courage and persistency of will with which 

* What is so well told in so accessible a book as Green's " His- 
tory of the English People," it does not seem worth while to repeat 
by way of narrative. 

10 



218 CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS. 

they face great disasters, and carry a great burden of 
duty through a hard and dangerous way. In reading 
his correspondence, we feel painfully that we have 
come upon a far lower intellectual level than we had 
in Leo, a hundred and fifty years before. He dwells 
rather pitifully on the marvels and terrors of saints' 
bones, and makes much of the filings of St. Paul's or St. 
Peter's chains, which he has enclosed in gold keys and 
sends as gifts of magic efficacy to barbarian lord or 
lady. But this childish way of thought is joined to 
a very manful courage and sincerity in dealing with 
the duties of his office. From that office he shrank 
back at first, as well he might ; fled from the city ; 
and yielded only when his retreat was betrayed by a 
miraculous light, and a white dove led the way to 
his pursuers. Of high rank and luxurious tastes, he 
cast those things absolutely away, starving himself to 
permanent ill health by his austerities, and enforcing 
such rigid monastic discipline in his own household 
that, when he learned once that a brother had kept 
(for keepsake, perhaps) three pieces of gold, he would 
pardon him not even on his death-bed, but cast his 
body with the coins upon a dunghill, saying, as Peter 
to Simon Magus, " Thy money perish with thee ! " 

These bitter rigors and self-denials were the answer 
made, by a conscience highly strung, to the appeal of 
the miseries that surrounded him in the city, thrice 
desolated, by violence, flood, and pestilence. But it 
is not the story of his fourteen years' rule (590-604), 
rigid, charitable, energetic, and wise, that we have to 
look at now ; only the astonishing industry and moral 
energy of the man. His correspondence is immense. 



SAINT BONIFACE. 219 

His homilies, commentaries, and moral treatises, in 
many volumes, have earned him the title of " last of 
the Fathers." This great amount of work he did with 
a definite practical aim, with genuine humility, among 
the distractions of office ; surrounded by what looked 
to him a mere chaos of wild waves, amidst which the 
ship he was pilot of was tossing helplessly ; suffering 
too with illness and torments of " gout " (inflamma- 
tory rheumatism, probably), and for years able only to 
drag himself from bed for three hours in the day, to 
attend the ceremonies of his priesthood. As he grew 
old, he felt these pains and cares more heavily, — 
poisoned, perhaps, with the malaria that already began 
to infect the neighborhood of Rome. " Oppressed with 
its burden," said he, " my soul sweats blood." Yet 
he, more than any other one man, was the chief of 
that great crusade, which he directed from his sick 
bed ; a campaign, says Ozanam, fought out by " in- 
valids and women and slaves." 

The next very eminent leader in this campaign — 
at the end of another century and a half — is the 
English Winfried, otherwise St. Boniface of Germany, 
who was martyred in 755. His work was a direct 
though distant result of Gregory's great enterprise in 
Saxon England. Eor the Saxons were at this time 
chief and most formidable of all the barbarous nations ; 
and, though Christian in England, still hung like a 
heavy cloud all along the northeastern portion of 
half-civilized France, fanatic in their old paganism, 
till subdued by Charlemagne, with other outlying 
tribes, many years later, in thirty-three bloody cam- 
paigns. 



220 CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS. 

I do not know where we have a higher example of 
blended sweetness and courage, with a native frank- 
ness and nobleness of temper, than in the life of Boni- 
face. It has been asked whether his courage was not 
rather of a feminine sort, considering, perhaps, the 
passive serenity of his death. But, from the time 
when the first great passion seized him, at the age of 
twenty-three, of giving himself to this service, till his 
death at seventy-two, his life was spent by choice in 
the rudest and most hazardous exposures. While 
passively obedient to meekness in his devotion to the 
authority of Eome, he is plain to bluntness in rebuk- 
ing to the Pope himself the disorders he found in the 
Christian capital: "These carnal men, these simple 
Allemans, Boians, and Franks, if they hear of such 
things at Eome as we forbid, will think them lawful, 
and be offended. They hear of pagan dances, shouts, 
and songs close by the church, at new-year, day or 
night ; and that one will not lend his neighbor tool 
or fire ; and that women w T ear amulets, garters, and 
bracelets, in pagan fashion, and sell the same. With 
these carnal and ignorant people, such things are a 
great hindrance to our doctrine. If you prohibit them 
at Rome, it will be a great gain to you and to us." 
And he warns the Pope of grosser scandals reported 
within the church. " The pagan rites," answers Zach- 
ary, "we judge detestable and pernicious"; and he 
says they must be put down. The worse offences he 
entreats Boniface "noway to believe." This frankness 
of correspondence is an honor alike to both. 

It was the yearning of kindred, no less than pure 
missionary zeal, that drew the Saxon Winfried from 



BONIFACE AND CHARLES MAETEL. 221 

the pleasant South of England, towards those un- 
tamed Saxons of the Continent, whom he could ad- 
dress in his and their mother tono;iie.* 

Now if we remember the place which this same 
Saxon race has rilled in history, — how it was the 
steady support of the Lutheran Eeform on one side and 
of English Puritanism on the other; how it makes 
the mass and strength of the two great empires of 
Britain and Germany to-day, and of the American Be- 
public ; how its blood and its language have spread, 
through its great genius for colonization, till they are 
dominant over nearly a third of the earth's surface 
and population, — we shall better appreciate the great- 
ness of the work that was set on foot when Boniface 
penetrated the wilds beyond the Ehine, to preach in 
his native English there. 

This work was distinctly understood to be the task 
of civilization, and the saving of what men had then 
best worth saving. We can still read the awkward 
Latin of the safe-conduct given by Charles Martel to 
this missionary monk, and signed with his hand and 
seal. This is in 724, in the midst of the gathering 
and disciplining of that confederation, with which 

* The speech in which lie addressed them is almost intelligible 
to our English ears to-day, as preserved in this fragment of his 
baptismal vows : " Forsachis tu diobolse 1 — Ec forsacho diobolae. — 
End allum diobol-gelde {fellowship) 1 — Ec forsacho allum diobol- 
gelde. — End allum dioboles werkum? — End ec forsacho allum 
dioboles werkum end wordum : Thunaer, ende Woden, ende Sax- 
note, ende allem them unholdum the hira genotas sint {unholy 
that are akin to them). — Gelobis tu in Got almehtigan fadaer? — 
Ec gelobo in Got almehtigan fadaer. — Gelobis tu in Crist, Godes 
suno? — Ec gelobo in Crist, Godes suno. — Gelobis du in Halogan 
Gast ? — Ec gelobo in Halogan Gast." [This is a little mangled in 
Migne, but restored by Ozanam.] 



222 CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS. 

eight years later he met Abdelrahman on the plain of 
Tours, and dammed back the flood of Saracen con- 
quest. The penniless unarmed monk and the power- 
ful military chief respected one another as allies in 
the defence of Christendom, — neither more indispen- 
sable than the other. As a token of the same alli- 
ance, nearly thirty years later, Boniface anointed 
with his own hand Charles's son Pepin as king of 
the Franks (752), in place of the degenerate and 
worthless house of Clovis, so sealing the compact of 
the Monarchy and Church, and completing the first 
act in the founding of the Christian Empire, which 
we shall see presently as one of the essential steps of 
civilization. 

The service of those near thirty years was crowned 
by the founding of the monastic school at Fulda, one 
of the chief fountains of German culture* In his 
ecclesiastical residence at Mentz, on the Ehine, he 
might have found rest in his old age, and his life's 
work well done. But the same great yearning drew 
him towards those Low Countries where the cloud of 
Paganism still hung heaviest. " Know, my son," said 
he to his successor, " that the time of my death draws 
near. Go on with the work I have begun ; finish the 
church at Fulda, and, when my time is come, bury me 
there ; prepare what is needful for my journey, and do 
not forget, with my books, to send a winding-sheet." 
And with these words he left him weeping. 

And so he went to the rude Low Country toward 

* See the curious account (copied in Kingsle} r 's " Roman and 
Teuton"), in Eigil's Life of Sturmi, of the discovery and selection 
of this spot. — Migne, Patrologia, cv. 530. 



MARTYRDOM OF BONIFACE. 223 

the North, where he lived by the river-side, and bap- 
tized the converts who came to him as to John by 
Jordan. But one day there came, instead of the band 
of disciples he was looking for, a wild crew of Pagans, 
who " with great din and horrid array of arms burst 
upon the encampment of the saints." At first, his 
young men would resist by force. " But the holy Bon- 
iface, hearing the onset of the tumultuous crowd, fled 
to the refuge of spiritual defence, taking (that is) the 
relics of saints which he always had with him. So he 
checked the young men, saying, ' Do not fight, my 
children ; do not bear arms against our adversaries, 
which Holy Scripture forbids. We are taught to re- 
turn not evil for evil, but even good for evil. The day 
long desired is come, when we are bidden from the 
toil and sorrow of this world to the joys of eternal 
blessedness. Strengthen yourselves rather in the Lord, 
and accept gratefully his offered mercy.' But, behold ! 
before his words were ended, the furious troop rushed 
upon them, and slew them in the blood of a happy 
martyrdom." 

The letter of the story we may often have to ques- 
tion. But, without any doubt, ifc tells us the temper 
of that long campaign, in which the victory was 
gained, once for all, for civilization and intelligence. 
The barbarian world, once nominally won to the 
Church, would become the field of what we are to 
know hereafter as mediaeval and modern Christianity. 

But here, to make the sketch complete, we must 
anticipate a little the course of time. Along with 
the conquests of Charlemagne, — those pitiless con- 
quests, in which (it was said) all were cut off who 



224 CONVEESION OF THE BAEBAEIANS. 

were " taller than the Emperor's sword, " — a sort of 
nominal Christianity had been carried deep into the 
Saxon forests, and a mongrel faith had driven back 
the worship of Odin and Thor. Such as it was, how- 
ever, and spite of many a formidable recoil of the old 
superstition, it seems to have pledged those regions to 
alliance with the Christian monarchy of the West. 

Loyalty to their creed was like loyalty to their flag. 
With whatever misgiving and reluctance, the rude 
Saxon, having once enlisted on the other side, stood 
stanchly by the mightier Power that had foiled his 
fathers' gods. The chief peril to those wavering con- 
quests of the Church militant lay in the barbarous 
realm beyond. The breach might be quickly healed 
where it had been quickly broken ; and a Scandina- 
vian or Slavonic horde might find itself in alliance 
with all the passionate terrors of a lingering Paganism- 

Early in the ninth century, Paschasius Eadbert 
(whom we shall hear of again, more than once) was 
head of a celebrated school at Corbey. His favorite 
pupil was a young man, Anschar, a warm disciple of 
his brooding and mystical theology. In the fervid 
visions of his youth, Anschar had beheld the visible 
glory of the Lord, and had heard himself summoned 
by celestial voices to spend his life for the conversion 
of the heathen, and so to win the blessed crown of 
martyrdom. His heart was brave, and his will firm ; 
but his piety often took a sombre and penitential cast, 
leading him to solitude and austerities, out of the 
line of active duty. Conceiving himself to be fore- 
appointed to some great enterprise, he waited for some 
clear call to his real work. 



ANSCHAR, APOSTLE OF THE NORTH. 225 

At twenty-four he found himself already engaged 
in it. From the monastic school at New Corbey on 
the Elbe, the Christian conquests begun by Boniface 
were pushed by Anschar into the remoter north. At 
Hamburg, where a fortress had been built among the 
dense forests that made the pagan frontier, and after- 
wards at Bremen, he had his bishopric. And here he 
found native helpers. Harold Hlak, an exiled Dane, 
had found refuge with the Emperor Louis, son of 
Charlemagne, adopting the Christian faith, and his 
return opened the way for a mission among his peo- 
ple. Eoving Scandinavian traders, or freebooters, 
had been as far as Micklagard, the " great city " of the 
East ; and there, or along the Levant, or on the British 
coast, or at the Frankish court, they had found the 
worship of the " white Christ," whose invisible might 
had broken the Saxon strength, and forced their old 
religion to hide itself among wilder mountains, in 
ruder forests.* The secret charm of a more powerful 
faith ; the Eoman ritual, which seemed to them the 
invocation of a new order of spirits ; intercourse with 
their own Christian captives, and the sense that they 
were dealing with a more skilled and educated race, 
— all prepared them to welcome the new religion. At 
their request, and under convoy of a trading fleet, 
Anschar pursued his mission to the North. 

Of the result we know not much more than that 
he was favored by a strong party among the Swedes ; 
that he was partly foiled by an attack of pirates, who 
seized most of the royal gifts and holy vessels on the 

* All this is told in a charming tale, "Anschar, the Apostle of 
the North," by Richard John King (London). 

10* o 



226 CONVERSION OF THE BARBARIANS. 

way ; that he met the fierce hostility of the old Pa- 
ganism, which stood savagely at bay in this its last 
fortress ; that his church and bishopric at Hamburg 
were laid waste with fire ; and that, after long wan- 
dering and peril, he died at sixty -four, grieving that 
his Lord had not thought him worthy of the martyr's 
crown. 

These three, Gregory, Boniface, and Anschar, are 
conspicuously the heroes of that long crusade ? whose 
glory belongs to many generations and many thou- 
sands of faithful men. Their completed work is seen 
in the great fact, made clear before the end of this 
period, that all Western Europe, from Sicily on the 
south to Norway or even Iceland on the north, is 
allied in one spiritual empire, and embarked on the 
career of a common civilization. 



XL 
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 

WE have seen in Christianity, from the begin- 
ning, something more than a system of doc- 
trine, more than a movement of religious or reforming 
zeal. Its first announcement was that " the kingdom 
of heaven is at hand."" These words were taken very 
literally to mean the regeneration of society, and the 
founding of a Divine Order on earth. Its scheme was 
social, and even political, quite as much as it was re- 
ligious. The Church was organized for discipline and 
authority, quite as much as it was for piety, charity, 
or emotional appeal. Its success meant revolution in 
the state, quite as much as conversion of the soul. 
The Messianic hope of the reign of the chosen people 
passed directly over to it as a heritage, and as an ele- 
ment of power ; and was adopted in the sense that all 
institutions and all authority among men are right- 
fully subject to the law of Christ as interpreted by 
the ministers of Christ. 

The reign of Constantine had been in part a fulfil- 
ment of that scheme. It was the task of a Christian 
Emperor to make over the institutions of the Empire 
after the Christian model ; at the very least, to make 
himself the official defender of the faith. We have 
seen how this view became idealized in Augustine's 



228 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 

" City of God " ; and how it was expanded into the 
conception of a spiritual Empire, co-ordinate with the 
military dominion of Rome, we have heard from the 
lips of Leo. We have followed, for the space of more 
than three centuries, the conquests of that idea. We 
have now to see the form it takes, as the period of 
conquest is passed ; as the task of Christianity comes 
to be the shaping out of a political constitution, and 
the administration of secular power. 

Our immediate object of study, then, is the Empire 
which came into being at the end of the eighth cen- 
tury. It is, in a very accurate sense, the goal towards 
which organized Christianity has been tending for 
about five hundred years. The great historic figures 
of Constantine and Charlemagne stand — as in the 
stately porch of St. Peter's — at the two extremities 
of the course. As to the series of events that fill the 
long interval, the task of the historian, from our point 
of view, is to set forth as well as he can the motive 
and spirit of the great Christian leaders. This is per- 
haps not very difficult. We see pretty clearly what 
was the ideal of society and life as they conceived it ; 
and, on the whole, we may fairly say that they kept 
that ideal pretty steadily in view, as the real aim of 
their policy and conduct. 

We are not quite so clear in our view of the great 
social revolution now to be described. The circum- 
stances are more perplexed. The motives are more 
mixed. The responsibility of power compels a new 
standard of judgment. Great events (such as the 
conflicts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) 
resulting from that revolution throw back their 



IMPERIAL ROME. 229 

own light, sometimes very painfully, on the actors 
in it. 

Still, in the main, we must follow the same rule, — 
to put ourselves in their place as well as we can. We 
must not judge that new Christian alliance of Church 
and Empire by the shape it actually took at any given 
time ; still less by the horrible abuses, the travesties, 
the corruptions, that came about long generations 
after, which are too often the only material offered 
for our judgment. 

Nor, on the other hand, should we be misled by the 
purely ideal and abstract way of regarding it which 
we find in Dante, and in the great speculative church- 
men who were his teachers. All that will come be- 
fore our notice in due time. But, just now, we must 
do it the justice of seeing it from the point of view of 
the men who were the living actors in it. We must 
take into our regard their ideal, as well as their very 
coarse and hard surroundings, and the equally coarse 
and hard temper bred by the passions of the struggle. 
We must see, if we can, what they thought ought to 
be done, what they thought could be done, and what 
they really tried to do. 

Now we must bear in mind — besides the ideal of 
human society itself, which they held then, or which 
we hold now — that there was before their eyes a 
form of government actual, irresistible, invincible, 
and by its innumerable agents present everywhere. 
This was the government of Imperial Eome. We 
must not underrate the importance of that fact, es- 
pecially the powerful charm it always held upon 
their imagination. " The peace of the Empire " was 



230 THE HOLY EOMAN EMPIRE. 

to them more than a phrase. For about two centu- 
ries, from Augustus to Commodus, it had been the 
symbol of a certain authority of law, a security of life, 
a frequency and easiness of intercourse, a central, 
controlling, and on the whole beneficent majesty, — 
strongly relieved against old memories of conflict 
everywhere, against the more dismal horror of the 
century's civil war in Borne, the desolation, violence, 
and fear men associated with outlying barbarism.* 
The dominion of Eome, haughty and superb, included 
all they knew of culture, art, splendor, civil order ; 
all they thought of as lawful authority and power. 
All the sanctities w 7 hich ancient life had known, such 
as they were, had come to be embodied in that awful 
and supreme dominion. 

Eome had been prefigured, too, in prophecy, as last 
of the four great kingdoms of the earth ; and so its 
name had to the Christian as well as the Pagan mind 
something of a superhuman spell. It might perse- 
cute and afflict the subjects of the Church, as under 
the best of emperors, Trajan and Aurelius. It might 
attempt to extirpate them as enemies and traitors, as 
under the worst of tyrants, Nero and Galerius. It 
might stand to them as the visible type of Antichrist, 
a kingdom of Satan, to be presently overthrown, as in 
the imagination of St. Augustine. But even then 
there was something about it of sanctity and awe. 
Martyrs of the faith testified on one side to its cor- 
ruption and iniquity ; but at the same moment legions 

* See the very touching illustrations of this feeling given in 
Hodgkin's " Italy and her Invaders," Vol. II. pp. 505-508. Com- 
pare Claudian. In Rufinum, ii. 86-100. 



EOME AN T D THE BARBARIAN. 231 

of Christian soldiers — as the "thundering lesion " of 
Aurelius — were fighting in its defence. Their abso- 
lute loyalty to it in idea and in theory is as strongly 
marked as their absolute courage in defying its power 
and enduring its torture. We must -bear in mind, 
then, that the Empire of Eome stood to them, as it 
was exhibited by Leo the Great and as it stands to 
the Catholic mind to-day, the type of sovereignty, — 
irresistible, august, divine. 

Again, we must think of this wide and powerful 
dominion as it commanded the homage and vague 
awe of barbarous tribes, who knew it only at a dis- 
tance. They were not wanting in intelligence, any 
more than in courage. Their imagination was all the 
more apt to be overawed, since nothing could offer 
itself for comparison with that mysterious source of 
power whose effects they felt. The weakness of bar- 
barism before it was not lack of bravery, or lack of 
men, or even lack of discipline. It was lack of organ- 
ization on a large scale. "Wherever the barbarian 
came in contact with it, or heard of it by remotest 
rumor, — in African waste, or Parthian wild, or Ger- 
man wood, — it was always and everywhere the same 
Roman eagle he met, the same compact force of 
small,* tough, swarthy, nervous, disciplined, indom- 
itable men, all trained alike to obey and to die for 
that distant, dim abstraction, the Eternal City. He 
met the same type of commander, — patient, resolute, 
hardy : like Caesar, snatching a shield from a common 

* " Men of such petty size (tantalce staturce) : for our littleness is 
mostly held in contempt among the Gauls, in comparison with 
their own bigness." — Caesar, B. G., ii. 30. 



232 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 

soldier, to fight without helm or breastplate in the 
van ; like Hadrian, bare-headed and on foot in the hot 
dust of Egypt or the forests of Gaul, — and always 
obedient to the spell of that invincible Name. 

This, I say, must have been the effect on men's 
imagination of those five hundred years of conquest ; 
of those eight centuries during which no armed enemy 
had entered the Eoman gate ; of that genius for organ- 
ization which created the same type of rule, obeyed 
the same symbol of authority, established the same 
code of law, wherever a Eoman force got footing on 
the soil. The spell was all the stronger, because the 
source of that authority was something mysterious, 
vague, unseen. Or, if a barbarian embassy or captive 
chief came to visit the Imperial City, the great circuit 
of the walls and their invincible strength, the splen- 
dor, wealth, and luxury, the strange spectacle of civil 
order among a vast city population, could only, by 
report of them, deepen and confirm the spell. Thus 
for three centuries, while Gaul and Goth made the 
chief strength of Roman armies, no Gaul or Goth 
conceived a thought of disloyalty to the Roman name, 
or of substituting his own authority for that he served 
under. So Alaric was haunted by a voice, he said, 
that gave him no quiet day or night, commanding him 
to assault and capture Rome ; * but first he led his 
soldiers six years up and down in Italy, as if held off 
by the potent charm, and when at last he had taken 

* " Non somnia nobis, 
Nee volucres, sed clara palam vox edita luco est : 
Rumpe omnes, Alarice moras ! hoc impiger anno, 
Alpibus ltalioz ruptis, penetrabis ad Urbem." 

Claudian, De Bello Getico, 546, 547. 



THE EMPIRE, SYMBOL OF SOVEREIGNTY. 233 

the city and plundered it, within a year he was dead, 
and his force dispersed. So Eadagaisus, with his vast 
host, had perished, lingering about Florence on his 
way to the assault of Borne. So Attila, the " scourge 
of God," had been deterred by the peaceable embassy 
of Leo, who warned him of the sudden fate of all who 
had offered violence to the holy city ; and the bar- 
barian had yielded, saying that he saw behind the 
venerable priest the apparition of an old man with a 
terrible countenance and threatening gesture, — which 
men thought was the Apostle Peter, but which we 
may think was the spectre of the majesty of Borne; 
and, a few months later, he too died, choked by his 
own blood. So Odoacer the Herulian giant, real 
sovereign of Italy, to whom St. Severinus had foretold 
dominion when he stooped to enter the hermit's hut, 
held that dominion first as the loyal officer of the last 
boy-tenant of the Boman throne, and then as " Patri- 
cian " by appointment of the Eastern Emperor. So 
Theodoric the Ostrogoth reigned thirty-three years 
in Italy as representing the best training that the 
Empire could give, and as guardian of the art and 
culture that the Empire had been able to hand down. 
The vague awe of Borne, as something mysterious, 
far-off, and invincible, had thus stamped itself deep 
on the barbarian mind. The Empire became the 
symbol of superhuman, absolute, universal sovereignty, 
so far as that mind could conceive such a thought ; 
for which, indeed, no other symbol could possibly 
occur. Accordingly — and it is one of the most curi- 
ous traits of the barbarian mind — any badge of 
authority, any military title, the official robe or coro- 



234 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 

net bestowed by the Eoman Emperor long after the 
Empire itself had been humiliated by disasters, dis- 
sensions, and defeats, was prized by a Gothic or Frank- 
ish chief as a dignity that no barbarian rank or mere 
success of arms could possibly give. To go no further 
back, the truculent Clovis, who did not scruple to 
cleave the skull of foe or kindred with his own battle- 
axe, took a serious and solemn delight in the title 
Patrician sent him by the Emperor of the East ; he 
clothed himself with the purple robe, paraded on 
horseback with ring and coronet, and scattered with 
his own hand among the crowd gold and silver coins 
which he had caused to be struck, with the Emperor's 
image on one side, and his own name as Consul and 
Augustus on the other. Not that it added anything 
to his power. As chief of the Frank confederacy he 
was no doubt stronger, at any rate felt himself to be, 
than Anastasius on his distant throne. But the patri- 
cian rank and name gave him something that barbar- 
ism could not give, — the prestige and sanction of an 
authority linked with the memories and upheld by 
the sanctities of a thousand years. 

This reverence for Eoman prestige and authority 
became a tradition with the Frankish house, along 
with their fierce zeal for the orthodox faith. And it 
is curious to see, a few generations later, how the rude 
affectation of Roman dignity by the long-haired Mero- 
vingian kings, who clad themselves in royal robes and 
rode in state carriages drawn by oxen, ruined them 
with their turbulent subjects ; who speedily adopted 
for their kings such real chiefs as Charles Martel and 
his shrewd, strong-handed son Pepin. So the long- 



DONATION OF PEPIN. 235 

haired race of " do-nothing " sovereigns passed away, 
and Pepin was crowned king by the hand of Boniface, 
with the blessing of the Pope. Meanwhile the Em- 
peror at Constantinople had since the fall of the 
Western Empire held out the shadowy sceptre of 
authority over Italy and the West, claiming the Pope 
as subject. But Ptavenna, his Italian capital, had 
been swept up in the Lombard kingdom ; and Pepin, • 
who as the Pope's ally had beaten back the Lombards, 
made over to the Pope the temporal rule of the terri- 
tory about Eome. So the Head of the Church became 
an Italian prince. The celebrated " Donation " of Pe- 
pin thus founded the temporal sovereignty of the Pope ) 
(756), which lasted eleven hundred years, till it was 
absorbed, in 1870, into the new Kingdom of Italy. 

This rapid recital is not meant for history, but to 
give the point of view and the point of time we have 
reached, at the moment of founding the Christian 
Empire of the West. Our business is not with the 
historical incidents, but with the policy, the aim, the 
ideal, that lay in the mind of the actors ; that gave 
direction to one of the most momentous revolutions 
and shape to one of the greatest political constructions 
that have been brought about in human affairs. 

It is one of the happiest accidents of history that 
associates the imposing personality of Charlemagne * 
with this transition, and has made the title " great " 

* It has come to be the fashion among historians to speak of 
him simply by his personal name, Charles or Karl. But, as Head 
of the revived Empire of the West, implying not only an actual 
but a typical or ideal sovereignty, it seems best to retain that by 
which he is most easily distinguished, which Mr. Freeman would 
restrict to the Charlemagne of legend and romance. 



236 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 

a part of the very name by which, he is known. The 
immediate circumstances that brought him to the 
spot where his colossal figure stands like a monument 
at the boundary of two ages were tragic, even some- 
what pitiful, as most things look when seen too 
nearly. The revolution did not take place without 
violence and parties in the Church. Leo III. had 
been attacked in some street procession, dragged from 
his horse, thrown into prison, and nearly killed by the 
cruel hands that clumsily tried to blind him and cut 
out his tongue, and so disqualify him by personal mu- 
tilation from holding the priestly office. He had taken 
refuge with Charles in France; and the strong hand 
of Charles had set him back securely in his place. 

The next year — it was Christmas, of the year 800 
— Charles visited him in Eome ; and, as he knelt at 
the high altar of St. Peter's in the vesper service, Leo 
put on his head the imperial crown, and the people 
joined in the salutation : To Charles crowned of God 
Augustus, great and peace-giving Emperor of the Bo- 
mans, life and victory ! . This was the first act of con- 
secration of the " Holy Eoman Empire," whose course, 
parallel with that of the Church, fills the central space 
of mediaeval history, and whose stately name, veiling 
a thin phantom of its authority, was not abolished 
till after more than a thousand years, when Napoleon 
compelled Francis of Austria to abdicate the title, 
holding himself, by force of his own arm, to be the 
true and legitimate successor of Charlemagne. 

At heart, Charles was no Eoman patrician, but a 
German chief. He delighted in border forays and 
border tales. He gathered with a careful fondness 



CHAKLEMAGNE. 237 

the native German ballads. He lived trie free life of 
a huntsman in the woods, when not in the stir of 
camp or court. He ranged incessantly from place to 
place in his wide ill-defined dominion, choosing for 
his capital not the royal town of Paris, much less 
Konie, but Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), near his most 
turbulent frontier, where he died, and where his sep- 
ulchre remains until this day. He bore with an ill 
grace the theatrical pomps and splendors of his office, 
t— unless it might be to rival in public ceremonial 
the state of some distant sovereign whose embassy 
was waiting on him. Only twice in his life he put 
on the cumbrous robes of Eoman majesty, preferring 
the Gallic trousers and the loose sheep-skin jacket of 
his easy-going home-life. 

He chafed, too, under the rigid rules of church-dis- 
cipline, — that is, if he submitted to it at all. His 
household was no model of manners or morals ; he 
was at best an easy, fond, indulgent father, with a 
heart more large than wise ; and he never quite gave 
up the qjmsi-polygamy which had made the old 
scandal of Frankish chiefs. His broad, bluff, generous 
humor, too, no doubt scandalized and perplexed his 
spiritual instructors ; though there was nothing that 
kept him nearer the heart of his own people, or that 
we find it easier to pardon : no precisian or martinet, 
but a large-souled and whole-souled man. 

To these traits we should add the immense exter- 
nal activity of his long reign : * relief of Eome from 
Lombard pressure, till that kingdom was extinguished 
in 774 ; war against the Saracens in Spain, where the 
* Of forty-six years, extending in all from 768 to 814. 



238 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIEE. 

hero Boland, favorite of romance, fell in the retreat 
at Roncesvalles ; thirty-three campaigns across the 
Rhine, mainly against the pagan Saxons, who were 
not reduced till after forty-five hundred prisoners 
had been slaughtered in one bloody act of reprisal, 
and ten thousand families, a third of the population, 
dispersed in colonies in the heart of France. So the 
conqueror finished what the monk began. 

The toils of war are even outdone by the restless 
industry of his administration. This shows the 
minute organizing of a civilized state, just emerging 
from rude disorder. He orders tithes to be given to 
the churches ; standard weights and measures to be 
kept ; vines to be especially attended to ; shelter for 
cattle, sheep, swine, and goats to be prepared in every 
village. He gives special directions for the care of 
stables, the curing of provisions, and the furnishing 
of houses, not neglecting the condition of stock and 
crops, or the- price of eggs and poultry. He attends 
to the keeping and training of hawks and hounds ; 
directs the great wolf-hunts, when and how they shall 
be carried on, the skins to be exhibited to him ; and 
the housekeepers on his estates must understand 
making cider, beer, and perry. I have counted a list 
of more than a hundred herbs and fruit-trees which he 
desires always to have kept in the imperial gardens.* 
Some of the largest stones used in building his own 
cathedral at Aachen, it is said, he bent his sturdy 
frame to bear. Messengers in his name must visit 
every district four times a year, to correct or at least 
report all irregularity. Every estate of a given size 

* See the Capitulary Be, Villis Imperialibus, a. d. 812, § 70. 



PERSONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE EMPEROR. 239 

must send one man to serve in the public defence. 
Kules equally vigilant and precise lay down the duty 
of the local clergy, or order periodical visits of the 
bishop. He is as prompt to supersede a churchman 
as an army officer, when found guilty of gross neglect.* 
It is necessary to speak of these personal cares of 
office, because the government had to be personal in 
the strictest sense. Most likely, there was no other 
mind clear enough to see the need, or conscience to 
feel the burden, any more than there was another 
hand strong enough to do the task. The weight of 
that great personality is felt all the more, that his 
empire fell to pieces so soon after his death. In one 
sense it was premature, an experiment that had to 
fail. The mere fact that he carried all that weight 
would help to keep any other from growing up fit to 
bear it after him. The real organization of European 
society, which he attempted so heroically, had to 
come about at a later age. The unwieldy empire 
had to be broken up in fragments, so that a new 

* Thus in the first of his Capitularies, §§ 6, 7 : " We ordain that, 
according to the canons, every bishop shall give heed within his 
own charge, that the people of God do no pagan rites ; but that 
they reject and put away all defilement of the gentiles, — profane 
sacrifices for the dead, or fortune-tellers or diviners, or amulets 
and charms, or incantations, or immolating of victims, which fool- 
ish people do near churches with pagan rite in the name of holy 
martyrs or confessors of the Lord ; who invite their saints rather 
to wrath than mercy. We advise that each year every bishop 
shall carefully visit his charge in circuit, and endeavor to confirm, 
instruct, and watch the people, and forbid pagan rites, diviners, 
fortune-tellers, auguries, amulets, incantations, and all defilements 
of the gentiles." Churchmen are forbidden (Capit. Ann. 781) to 
keep hawks or hounds, — the latter, lest those who appeal for char- 
ity should be " torn by the bite of dogs." 



240 THE HOLY EOMAN EMPIRE. 

structure might strike innumerable roots into the 
soil, and grow up in innumerable independent shoots. 
The great need then was that the ideal of an orderly 
and Christian State should be conceived in one pow- 
erful mind, and its foundations should be laid by one 
strong hand. The events of Charles's reign, and its 
inordinate activities, are the mere incidents and sur- 
roundings of the great work he really did, in creating 
such an ideal of Christian sovereignty. 

That this ideal lay very close to his heart, and was 
always present to his thought, — whatever the defects 
of its carrying-out, — appears in one very interesting 
trait recorded by Eginhard. " He took delight," he 
says, " in the books of St. Augustine, and especially in 
those which are entitled Of the City of God" which 
were read to him at meal-time. Those books, it is 
true, do not give any plan or pattern of a Christian 
State to be realized on earth, such as we might pos- 
sibly expect. But they set forth with great em- 
phasis the contrast of right and wrong, of the state 
sacred and profane. They put in strong light the 
corruption and violence that had destroyed the Pagan 
Empire ; they bring into equal relief the virtues of 
the Divine Kingdom, and the peace that grows out 
of them. They set forth vividly the warning given in 
the fall of Eome, crushed under its own vices and 
feuds long before the assault of barbarian arms. 
And, from the hint just given, as well as from the 
incessant coupling of religious things with secular in 
his laws, it is likely that these lessons and these 
warnings had been taken very much to heart by 
Charles, in his reflections on the duties of empire. 



THE IMPERIAL IDEA. 241 

We may see the same thing, perhaps, in his shrink- 
ing from those duties and from the name of Emperor.. 
His coronation took him by surprise. He protested, 
says his biographer, that he would not have gone to 
the church that day, if he had known what Leo had 
in store for him. Possibly his sagacity foresaw the 
use that would be made of that act by Leo's succes- 
sors, to bolster up their enormous claim that the 
Empire itself was in their gift, to bestow or revoke as 
their policy might demand. It has been noticed that 
an interval of more than a year passed, before he 
claimed allegiance as Emperor ; and then he stays to 
explain " how many and how great things are com- 
prehended in that vow: not merely, as many even 
now suppose, to the lord Emperor in his own lifetime, 
and not to bring any enemy for hostility within his 
realm, and not take part in or conceal any one's infi- 
delity towards him ; but that every man may know 
that this vow has bearing direct upon himself " ; and 
so he goes on, in forty chapters, to recite a whole 
code of civil and religious duty.* 

That rude time could not show any very flattering 
fulfilment of such an ideal. But there is no question 
that the reign of Charlemagne did very much to 
stamp that conception on the general mind ; to make 
it part of the notion of what a state should be, as well 
as to enshrine him in memory as a sort of model sov- 
ereign. There have been many emperors and kings 
who have come nearer the commonly received pat- 
tern of Christian living ; but not one so dignified or 
idealized in the imagination of the world. The Church 

* See the 24 Sections of the Capitulary dated at Aachen, 802. 
11 p 



242 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 

puts him iii the next rank to saintship, and in some 
countries he has been frankly reverenced as a saint. 
Miracles are recorded to have been wrought at his 
tomb. Within a century of his death he is made the 
hero of legend and marvel, and volumes of popular 
romance already gather about his name. His mili- 
tary adventures are transfigured to make him the 
ideal Champion of Christendom, carrying his con- 
quests as far as Jerusalem, as the great typical Cru- 
sader. And he is so appealed to in the oration by 
which Urban II. stirred the multitude at Clermont to 
the first Crusade (1094). . 

The real man, in his hearty humor, his rude sports, 
his cordial loves and enmities, and his serious wish 
to do his work, is a much more interesting person 
than this fabulous ideal. His traits are known to us, 
as few men's are of a former age, by personal descrip- 
tion and admiring anecdote. I copy here a few 
sentences from his friend, favorite secretary, and 
biographer, Eginhard, — the hero of the romantic tale 
which tells how he won the love of his sovereign's 
stalwart daughter, and how she once carried him on 
her shoulder from a stolen visit, lest his footsteps 
should betray him in the new-fallen snow : — 

" In eloquence he was copious and ample, well able 
to express plainly whatever he would. Not content 
with his native speech, he bestowed pains in learning 
foreign tongues. Latin he could speak as well as his 
mother tongue ; Greek he could understand better than 
pronounce. He was so ready of speech that one might 
think him a schoolmaster. He studiously cherished 
liberal arts, and bestowed the highest honors on the 



CAEE OF EDUCATION AND CULTURE. 243 

teachers of them. A great deal of time and labor he 
spent in learning rhetoric and logic, and particularly^ 
astronomy. He learned the art of reckoning, and with 
eager curiosity would trace the path of the stars. He 
made attempts to write, and used to cany tablets or 
bits of bark, or keep them under his pillow, that he 
might practise his hand at odd times in shaping out the 
letters ; but this late and unseasonable effort had poor 
success. As long as health permitted, he promptly 
attended church, morning and evening, even in the 
night at time of service, and took great care that all 
should be done decently and in order ; and with great 
diligence he improved the st}~le of reading and chant- 
ing. He was well skilled in both ; though he never 
read .in public himself, and only sang softly, and in con- 
cert with others." 

Some copies add that he furnished eight hundred 
and eighty-six churches at his own expense, and 
restored in all three thousand seven hundred. He 
gathered about him learned men and artists, tiring 
them out with his incessant activity (says Guizot), 
and through them giving strong impulse to every form 
of culture. His imperial title challenged the regard 
of other powers. Irene, reigning Empress of Con- 
stantinople, proposed to unite East and West by mar- 
riage, having already been the death of her husband 
and son ; an alliance which Charles discreetly but 
firmly declined. Erom Haroun-al-Raschid, Caliph of 
Bagdad, he received an embassy, bringing, along w 7 ith 
command of the Holy Places, rich Oriental gifts, — 
the first elephant ever seen in Erance,* with a Moorish 
lion, a Numidian bear, eastern spiceries and drugs, " so 
* It arrived at Aachen, July 16, 812. 



244 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 

that the East might be thought to be stripped to fur- 
nish out the West"; a set of chessmen, said to be still 
preserved, and a clock of curious skill. * These em- 
bassies marked a period of almost universal peace. 
Tree passage for western pilgrims was given to the 
Holy Land. A fair was held yearly at Jerusalem for 
a fortnight, and arts of peace nourished from India to 
the farthest West. 

From the Ebro to the Danube, the limits of 
Charles's empire, the local names, it is said, inces- 
santly recall his memory ; while to write his history 
one should know at once the mountain-passes of 
Spain and the Alps, the Lombard towns, the old 
monuments of France, and the legends of the Ehine. 
His traditional beard and sceptre are travestied in 
the popular figure of the King at cards, f Or, to see 
the same figure on a larger canvas, barbarian tribes 
(it is said) in their rude traditions keep the memory 
of three great conquerors — Timour the Tartar, Alex- 
ander, and Charlemagne. 

But the interesting and instructive thing to us is 
to see how far we have got in the development of the 
Christian idea. And we find that we have got so far 
as this. Organized Christianity has completed its 
period of struggle and conquest. It has definitely 

* At the twelve figures were twelve little doors, which opened 
successively, letting drop so many balls to strike the hour ; and 
when the circle was finished, a row of little knights in ivory 
passed round and closed them all. The last two are not included 
in the documents of the Monumenta Carolina. 

t The game was invented to cheer the moody insanity of 
Charles VI. of France ; and this unhappy prince, it is said, always 
crossed himself when he touched the picture of the emperor-saint. 



LATER FORTUNES OF THE EMPIRE. 245 

superseded those old forms of Pagan society which 
had tried so hard to destroy it. What was worth 
saving in those old forms it has adopted into itself : 
something of the old art and culture, all the old ex- 
ecutive and organizing skill. It has persevered, with 
incredible energy and patience, till the intelligence 
and heart of pagan barbarism have been brought dis- 
tinctly to accept the Christian ideal and the Christian 
law. That law and that ideal it has now succeeded 
in implanting in the thought and embodying in the 
institutions of an Empire which distinctly adopts 
them as its own. This one moment has been achieved 
of absolute coincidence and harmony between the two 
great powers, spiritual and temporal, that together 
rule the world. It is but for a moment ; but it marks 
the passage to the next great era, when the task is 
no longer conquest, but administration ; when it is 
not an army or a campaign we have to do with, but 
a government and a constitution. 

A word remains to be said of the fortunes of the 
Christian Empire founded by Charlemagne. That 
perfect harmony of interest and motive between 
Church and State which made its ideal * could be at 
best but for a moment of unstable equilibrium. On 
one side violences and passions thinly covered, on the 
other natural jealousies and honest fears, were enough 
to dissolve an alliance which was the harder to keep 
the closer it had been knit. These are fatal dissolv- 
ing forces in all human things. But, besides these, a 

* This ideal theory of sovereignty makes the argument of Dante's 
De Monarchid. It is amply stated and illustrated in Bryce's " Holy 
Roman Empire," pp. 102-108 (7th ed.). 



246 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 

great political revolution was impending, which the 
Church must have seen with terror ; which it met, at 
any rate, with masterly determination and craft. The 
constitution that made its political scheme through 
seven centuries was founded on forged decretal and 
canon law. Its theory was Sacerdotalism, the abso- 
lute sanctity, immunity, and authority of the priestly 
Order. True to that theory, it would have overridden 
and absorbed all other power whatsoever. It would 
have established a universal Empire, supreme to 
men's thought in heaven, earth, and hell, and so 
laid mankind helpless at the feet of ecclesiastical 
absolutism. 

When the political fabric that Charles had pain- 
fully built together was broken up, in the great 
change we call the rise of Feudalism, the Church held 
to its theory ; and, after an age of incredible corrup- 
tion and disorder, declared open war upon the State. 
The Empire, which was in theory one, holy, and indis- 
soluble, ally and partner with the Church in the great 
work of civilization, was matched against it in an ob- 
stinate and bitter struggle of near two hundred years. 
Its title of " Holy Koinan Empire/' and its claim to 
dominion over Italy, were maintained by a long line 
of German kings. The proudest-tempered of them 
all, Henry IV., wore himself out to beggary and death 
(1073-1106) in a struggle with Hildebrand and the 
successors trained in the school of Hildebrand. The 
greatest of them all, Frederick Barbarossa, bent his 
stubborn will to beg peace of Alexander III., and 
his terrible Italian campaigns closed in the dra- 
matic scene of his humiliation before the Pope at 



SPIRITUAL AND TEMPOEAL SOVEREIGNTY. 247 

Venice (1177). The most brilliant and accomplished 
of them all, Frederick^IL, found himself thwarted 
and foiled at every hand by that stern old man, of 
nearly ninety, who ruled as Gregory IX. (1227-1241), 
and held him under the invisible spell of excommuni- 
cation. 

That close alliance of Church and Empire was a 
dream, out of which both awoke, to find themselves 
deadly enemies. It need not have been so, perhaps, 
if the boundaries of secular and spiritual power had 
been more clearly drawn and honestly kept. Un- 
questionably, the Empire observed those bounds bet- 
ter than its ghostly rival. There was a political order, 
a secular justice, a national independence, which in 
good faith it made many efforts to establish. Tempo- 
ral sovereignty, dealing with secular conditions only, 
may be fairly just ; spiritual sovereignty, in human 
hands, is necessarily tyrannical. A theory of suprem- 
acy was growing up within the Church, assiduously 
developed, incessantly urged and pressed, resting on 
the deep foundations of imagination and religious 
fear, which held that all human government -existed 
only by its sufferance ; which would have made any 
independence in the State, nay, any decent secular 
government at all, impossible. 

Such as it was, however, after the fall of the great 
imperial houses, the Holy Eoman Empire retained 
almost to our own day something of its sanctity and 
prestige. A few great names — the names of Eodolph 
and Sigismund, of Maximilian and Charles the Fifth 
— illustrate its later fortunes. But in the great 
dynastic wars and political revolutions its splendor 



248 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 

steadily faded out. Other forces held the field. Dig- 
nity was left it when its strength decayed. A phan- 
tom of authority long survived the substance of power. 
And no shock was felt in the political system when 
Napoleon, who had seized the imperial name as the 
symbol of his conquests, compelled the last heir of 
( Augustus, of Constantine, of Charlemagne, to abdi- 
. cate the title in 1806, and the Holy Roman Empire 
was no more. 



XII. 
THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 

IN a poetical " Lament " on the division of the Em- 
pire after the death of Louis the Pious, the 
writer speaks of the good time past, when " a noble 
realm wore its bright diadem as a wreath ; when there 
was one Prince, and one subject people ; when all cities 
flourished under one, law and judgment; citizens were 
bound in peace, the enemy repelled by their valor " ; 
when " the cherishing care of the priesthood was emu- 
lous in its task ; in frequent councils insuring right- 
eous laws to the people ; and the word of salvation 
sounded from far to a holy clergy, to noble prin- 
ces, and to common men " ; when " everywhere young 
men learned the book of God, and children's hearts 
drank in the art of letters." * 

* Florus Diaconus, Querela cle Divisione Imperii past mortem Ludo- 
vici Pii : — 

Floruit egregio claro diademate regnum ; 
Princeps unus erat, populus qaoque subditus umis. 
Lex simul et judex totas ornaverat urbes ; 
Pax cives tenuit, virtus exterruit hostes. 
Alma sacerdotum certatim cura vigebat, 
Conciliis crebris, populis pia jura ministrans. 
Hinc sacris cleris, hinc plebibus eximiisque 
Principibus late resonabat serrao salutis. 
Discebant juvenes divina volumina passim ; 
Littereas artes puerorum corda bibebant. 
11* 



250 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 

Nothing so softens our notion of that rude time as 
to be reminded in this way that there were tender 
thoughts and vigilant care, then as now, concerning 
the education of the young. The time which this 
Christian poet looks back on regretfully was when 
the schools nourished under the vigorous impulse of 
Charlemagne himself, or were continued by his son ; 
when they made, in one sense, the crowning work of 
that Christian Empire which stood in men's minds as 
the ideal of sovereignty. 

The great Emperor had, in fact, not only made his 
court the head-quarters of learning at that day, sparing 
no cost to bring together eminent scholars like Alcuin 
and Eginhard ; but he took delight in directing him- 
self the instruction of children, examined their classes, 
heard their essays, promised rewards to the diligent, 
or menaced the idle with the loss of all his favor ; and 
even undertook the task of superintending or (it is 
said) practising with his own hand the copying and 
elaborate ornamentation of manuscripts. Under the 
same powerful impulse, a great work of editing went 
on; and famous writings were cleared of the blots 
and blunders that had grown upon them in the ruder 
times that went before. So that we have to look upon 
this period as an early revival of letters. It gathered 
up on one hand whatever could be gathered from the 
past; and, on the other, it planted the seeds of a 
new, vigorous, and remarkable growth of independent 
thought. 

These two views, then, remain to be taken of the 
Christian Schools of the ninth century : first, looking 
to the past, as they represented the learning and cul- 



THE CLASSIC TRADITION. 251 

ture of the barbaric age ; next, looking to the future, 
as they opened the way to a new development of 
thought. The first must be treated very briefly ; the 
second, in a little more detail. 

The first thing we have to conceive, then, as dis- 
tinctly as we can, is the course of that unbroken 
stream of tradition, which had floated down the germs 
of ancient culture through what we call the Dark 
Ages. So far as this term is a fit one to use at all, it 
belongs to the period from the latter part of the fifth 
century to near the end of the eighth ; that is, from 
the time of Leo the Great to that of Charlemagne.* 
In Leo's time, we saw the great vigor of the pagan 
reaction in art and letters ; and we know the obsti- 
nacy of the pagan tradition in the world of imagina- 
tion and poetry, down to a very late day. In fact, 
what we call the classical school, as distinct from the 
romantic, holds avowedly to that tradition, even now. 

The reasons of this immense vitality of the pagan 
classic thought lie deeper than we are apt to think. 
It may perhaps be more accurate to say that they are 
strown thicker upon the surface, and are more care- 
fully worked into the soil, than we are apt to think. 
If we subtract from the school system of the present 
day what belongs properly to our own time, — as 
modern history, science, and literature, — we still see 
how great a space is left, in what most strongly affects 
the habit of mind, to the purely traditional culture of 

* The tenth century, it is true, is in a sort of eclipse, deeper 
perhaps than the darkness of either of the preceding; but this 
appears to be from moral or social causes rather than intellectual. 
"What we may call the Catholic philosophy had, at all events, been 
well established in the ninth. 



252 THE CHEISTIAN SCHOOLS. 

ancient languages and formal grammar. We may 
even doubt whether the most powerful educational 
influences, even now, do not run in the old channel, 
in our own best schools and colleges. Every educa- 
tional reformer has been astonished, if not staggered, 
at the dead-weight of resistance he has encountered 
from classic prejudice. 

. It is, really, the momentum of more than two thou- 
sand years' unbroken tradition that we are dealing 
with. The methods we use to-day, if not the same 
with, were at least developed step by step from, the 
methods of children's schools in Athens and in Home. 
Our best instruction in morals is exactly what w r e find 
in Plato's Lysis; the forms of words, the logic of 
structure, that we teach now, are the same that chil- 
dren were drilled in, conscientiously, in the Eoman 
imperial schools. The same rules and forms were 
carefully instilled as school-rudiments, the same lit- 
erary tradition was sacredly held fast, in all the ages 
that followed. They were retained with a clinging 
and (as it were) desperate tenacity through the bar- 
barian times, as if there were some peculiar sanctity 
in this one living link of connection with the ancient 
splendor. When Eome was almost famished, beg- 
gared, and depopulated, there was still heart left to 
celebrate a literary holiday. On one occasion a new 
poem — a versifying of the Book of Acts — had to be 
recited in public seven times over, occupying many 
days in all, to satisfy crowds that could not all hear at 
once, and that insisted on the repeating of favorite 
passages. And, as Eome impressed the barbarian 
imagination in other ways, so it imposed respect for 



CASSIODORUS. 253 

ancient letters, mixed possibly with a little awe. 
When the Goths were masters of Italy, it was pub- 
licly ordered (about 530) that the revenues of the 
public schools should be untouched. All else was 
fair plunder in the rage of conquest ; but the generous 
barbarian would not take away what was to feed the 
life of coming generations.* ■ 

It would not be hard, though it might be pedantic, 
to trace the series of names that make an unbroken 
chain through the centuries of barbarism. I shall 
mention only two or three. 

Cassiodorus, who lived, according to some accounts, 
to the great age of a hundred (463-563) ,f has been 
called the chief instructor of the barbarian world. He 
more than any other is the visible link between the 
old world of culture and the new. Till the age of 
seventy he was the confidential minister of Theodoric 
and his successor, Gothic kings of Italy ; and his cor- 
respondence, under their names, is the best picture 
we have of that period of change. In particular, there 
are two letters addressed to Boethius,j the honored 
counsellor and afterwards the victim of Theodoric, 
which give a lively notion of the skill and intelli- 
gence of the age. One is in praise of music; one 
commissions him to send gifts to a Burgundian prince, 
a sun-dial and a water-clock ; and he takes occasion 
to enlarge on these marvels of science, as we might on 
the electric light or the telephone. Evidently the 
argument is addressed not to Boethius, the most cul- 

* Cassiodorus, Epist, ix. 21. Compare Ozanam, Civilisation des 
Francs. 

t More probably 468-563. J Lib. i. 45 ; ii. 40. 



254 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 

tivated man of his age, but to the imagination of rude, 
eager, curious men, such as made up these nations of 
invaders. In the tumult and ruin of the time, it is 
pathetic to see this eager clinging to the wealth of in- 
telligence and art that seemed drifting to hopeless 
wreck. It was carrying on the same task in another 

(way, when in his old age Cassiodorus withdrew to a 
monastery of Southern Italy, and spent his thirty re- 
maining years in arranging, copying, correcting, restor- 
ing the treasures of classic learning, and in preparing 
the manuals of instruction that were of chief authority 
in the schools for the next few centuries. 

I have already spoken of the Christian poets of this 
dark period — such as Prudentius, Siclonius, and For- 
tunatus ; and of the pains they took to copy the form 
and preserve the diction of the Eoman writers. We 
are apt, perhaps, to think of the Latin hymns, from 
Ambrose down, in very simple measures, accented and 
sometimes rhymed, as if they were the only poetry of 
the time ; as if the classical model had quite perished. 
Nothing, on the contrary, strikes us often er or sooner 
in looking through the body of the Christian litera- 
ture, than the fond, abundant, often skilful handling 
of the metres of Yirgil and Horace : in simple hymns, 
in narrative, in elegy, in familiar playful or occasional 
address, — sometimes a little awkward in phrase, with 
false quantities now and then that rasp the ear ; but 
with serious painstaking that the literary art should 
not be lost. These poetic essays belong to every cen- 
tury, coming below the time and including the name 
of Charlemagne himself, who was a diligent learner 
in all arts of refinement, and whose epitaph on his 



CICERO AND VIRGIL. 255 

personal and dear friend, Pope Adrian I. (to whom lie 
had renewed and extended his father's grant in 774), 
is but a specimen of his very creditable skill * 

Doubtless, the value of this large body of Christian 
verse is not chiefly what it is in itself as poetry. It 
is rather a testimony to the faithful, patient, skilful 
school-instruction that went on from age to age. 
There was no contempt of pagan letters. The grave 
tone of Cicero's moral dialogues, and especially the 
prophetic strain of Virgil's fourth eclogue, in which 
he predicts a golden age of righteousness and peace, 
wholly won the Christian heart. Virgil's, it was said, 
was the golden key that opened to all classic antiquity 
the door of the Mediaeval Church. f 

Another thing is very noticeable in the large body 
of early Christian literature, — that is, from the fifth 
century to the ninth. It is the vast amount of com- 

* If we were to set any date for the dying out of the classic 
literary tradition, it would be that assigned in the " Lament " al- 
ready quoted. It is not until now that letters are quite overlaid 
by theology; it is not till about five centuries later that that heavy 
atmosphere has rolled quite away. 

t This fondness for the name and memory of Virgil is illustrated 
in a legend which tells how St. Paul, on landing at Puteoli, went 
to pay his homage at the poet's tomb. The following verses are 
said at one time to have been chanted in the cathedral of 
Mantua : — 

Ad Maronis mausoleum 
Ductus,fudit super eum 
Piae rorem lacrimze : 
" Quem te " inquit " reddidissem, 
Si te vivum invenissem, 
Poetarum maxime ! " 

And the chapel above the tomb used to be pointed out as the spot 
where Virgil went to hear mass. 



256 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 

ment and homily on the books of Scripture, the only 
recognized authority in religion, history, or morals ; 
and especially dwelling on the historical record of 
Scripture, all the way down from the Creation. In 
itself this is not surprising in an age ignorant of 
almost everything else. Still, one is led to think 
there was a motive in thus incessantly directing the 
mind of barbarian converts to the detail of Hebrew 
annals, often far from edifying.* This motive we 
shall find, if we reflect that those barbarians were 
men, so to speak, witliout a past, — except it might 
be a very near and bloody one. To the barbarian mind 
the past closes up behind, like a bank of mist, hiding 
all but a few distorted and exaggerated forms. Thus 
— to take historic examples — the same Theodoric 
whom Cassiodorus served, and the Brunehild who 
figures in the recital of Gregory of Tours, became 
mythologic hero and heroine in the Nibelungen ; or, to 
go farther back, the same Odin who ranks chief among 
the immortals in Scandinavian fable is held by some 
writers to have been the purely human leader of a 
migration out of Asia not many generations before. 

This great void in the barbaric mind must be filled, 
or this wild phantasmagory displaced, by the Chris- 
tian tradition. The rude tribe-life must be bound by 
religious association to the remotest past that could 
be conceived then, and widened to the broadest fel- 
lowship that might be consecrated by a common 
origin. Such crude ethnology as their teachers could 

* Ulfilas, in translating the Bible for his Gothic converts, omit- 
ted " Samuel " and " Kings," since the barbarian passion for fight- 
ing had no need of such stimulus or sanction. 



MILDNESS OF THE CATHOLIC THEOLOGY. 257 

explain thus entered as an element in that long task 
of education. 

This is as convenient a place as any to state an 
impression which flatly contradicts the notion some 
of us have got from other sources, as to the spirit of 
religious teaching in this period. The many volumes 

— some scores of thousands of pages — of early 
Catholic theology leave upon my mind a strong feel- 
ing of surprise at rinding so little appeal to the vulgar 
terrors of the future world. I do not mean by this 
that the doctrine implied all along was not as grim 
and terrible as it has ever been. It is assumed, we 
may say, as a matter of course, that there is no salva- 
tion out of the true Church. It is taken for granted 
that the penalty of sin or unbelief is everlasting- 
death, — or, a o'ood deal worse, everlasting torment. 
But this lurid background is a background merely. It 
is not forced, as we might expect, upon the imagination 
of the believer. Bather, it is made simply an appeal 
to his conscience, and is, on the whole, greatly ob- 
scured by the emphasis laid on other things. jSTo 
doubt cases might be quoted to qualify this state- 
ment. A few are readily recalled: a rhetorical flour- 
ish of Tertullian ; an appeal or two of the somewhat 
harsh and gloomy Ambrose ; a chapter in Augustine's 
" City of God " ; and a paragraph of some twenty lines 
from a homily of Boniface to the barbarians, — hardly 
a faint echo, all told, of the terrors of the Apocalypse. 
But I should say (not as a fact, but as an impression) 
that there is more " blood-theology " and " hell-fire " 

— that is, the vivid setting forth of everlasting tor- 
ment to terrify the soul — in one sermon of Jona- 

Q 



258 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 

than Edwards, or one harangue at a modern "re- 
vival," than can be found in the whole body of 
homilies and epistles through all the Dark Ages put 
together. Purely speculative doctrine, such as the 
Trinity or the Sacrament, is abundantly urged. No 
emphasis can be strong enough to state the need of 
strict accuracy of one's belief as to the most abstract, 
mystic, unprovable, unintelligible points of faith, 
with an implied menace of dreadful consequences to 
the lack of faith. And the moral doctrine taught we 
may often censure as overstrained and unwholesome, 
or else coarse and low. But, set beside more modern 
dispensations, the Catholic exposition of this period 
is surprisingly merciful and mild. The Church had 
other and better business in hand, than to add the 
terrors of eternity to those of time, which were black 
enough already. 

The sacred task of education, with its strong im- 
pelling motive, is brought even more vividly before 
us in the next name on the list, that of " the Vener- 
able Bede " (673-735). I wish there were time to go 
a little into the detail of the sweet and patient labor 
of his life, or at least to repeat the gentle and pathetic 
story of his death. * Bede, or Baeda, with whom the 
title " venerable " has grown to be almost part of his 
name, is best known to us as the historian of the 
Saxon Church, from Augustine of Canterbury to 
within three years of his own death. That, however, 
is only a chapter of his very voluminous works. 
These include extended homilies and comments on 

* It is well told in Green's " History of the English People " — 
with some slight affectations of speech, as Mr. Green's manner is. 



BEDE. — ALCUIN. 259 

almost all the Bible, and — more to our point — a 
.considerable treatise on the learning of the day. It 
begins with an essay on Orthography, the essential 
basis of true learning then, when trained proof-readers 
there were none, and all accuracy of speech was in 
danger of being lost by unskilful copyists. Then come 
the rules of Metre ; and then a series of treatises on 
the Beckoning of Time, — a very perplexed thing 
when there was no true astronomy, and when so 
many festivals turned on arbitrary reckoning. Thus 
the topic includes the whole science of arithmetic as 
then known, and such knowledge of the sun and 
moon as could be given, and the cause of eclipses, 
and expositions of the calendar ; and these lead, 
again, to some simple lore of meteorology, and the 
cause of thunder, and how tides are affected by the 
moon. Certainly we have not much to learn of nat- 
ural science from these crude essays of near twelve 
centuries ago. But we see, at least, that there were 
leisure and intelligence to observe such things ; and 
again we honor the high aim and motive of these 
pious teachers. 

The next name brings us down to the time we 
have been looking back from. Alcuin, most famous 
of all these teachers and men of learning, was born 
in the year of Bede's death, and died ten years before 
his friend and pupil Charlemagne (735-804). He 
also was an Englishman, caught on his return from 
Italy by the all-embracing Empire, and detained for 
his life-work at Charles's court, or at his monastery- 
school in Tours. He is the author of a great many 
of the pious and occasional verses I have mentioned ; 



260 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 

and it is a little odd to hear him address the king as 
" my David," speak of himself as " Flaeeus," and call 
his other friends by such names as " Homer " and the 
rest. Some of his letters and one or two dialogues 
turn on " enigmas," or plays upon words, riddles, and 
quaint forms of speech. These sportive efforts do not 
much disturb his gravity : the wit we may call pon- 
derous and slow, the gravity genuine and sincere. 
His correspondence is a very long one, and includes 
some of our most curious pictures of the time. But 
you are more struck with the great share it gives to 
serious counsel : at least a third are letters of advice ; 
at least half, if we include all the appeals to religious 
and moral motive. Cheerful in the main, and always 
showing how close to his heart is the thought of 
friendship, he never forgets, or lets you forget, that 
he is first of all a teacher. His longest dialogue, and 
most vivacious,* is a compend of Latin grammar. 

The above names do not give us the history, but 
they will serve to illustrate the course, of the Chris- 
tian Schools down to the time of Charlemagne. One 
thing in particular should be noticed in regard to 
them. They are strictly schools of instruction, not 
of investigation or of philosophic thought. Their 
foundation is wholly on precedent, or else on dogma. 
Their task is simply to co-operate with the Church in 
its great work of civilization. Their instructions they 
take unquestioning from the Church, when not given 
outright in the literary tradition. A little they may 

* Except an entertaining chapter of quirks and repartees in a 
conversation between Alcuin and the boy Pepin, son of Charle- 
magne 



MOVEMENT OF THOUGHT UNDER THE EMPIRE. 261 

have done in the development of doctrine : as when 
Bede comments on the texts of Paul, or Alcuin dis- 
cusses the Adoptian heresy. * Aside from such in- 
stances as these, we do not find a ray of original 
thought or independent speculation in what has 
proceeded from any of these schools. Their great 
teachers were content to be learners, f Their work was 
to instruct the childhood of a powerful race, and thus 
prepare the way for what it should do in its maturity. 
' This task of preparation may be said to have come 
to a natural term with the formation of the Christian 
Empire. That event marks, in a sense, the political 
manhood of the race ; and, in a sense still more qual- 
ified, its mental emancipation. It will be found, in 
the history of literature, that the chief productive 
periods of the human mind have generally come a 
little after some great political event, or series of 
events, that powerfully appealed to men's imagina- 
tion ; that shifted their mental bearings, so to speak, 
and compelled them to see all things in a new light. 
So it was with the age of Pericles, in the generation 
next after the great Persian war. So it was with 

o 

the Augustan age, following the collapse of parties in 
Borne. So it was with the Elizabethan as^e, following; 
the violent shocks of the Beformation. The ninth 
century was no such brilliant period of literature and 

* See below, page 262. 

t Their modest course of preparatory instruction was the 
Trivium : Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic ; their narrow circle of 
the sciences was the Quadrivium : Arithmetic, Geometry, Astron- 
omy and Music ; as in the memorial verses : — 

Gram, loquitur ; Dia. vera docet; Bhet. verba colorat ; 
Mus. canit ; Ar. numerat ; G. ponderat ; As. colit astra. 



262 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 

art as those ; yet its great fertility and comparative 
independence of intellect are naturally and justly to 
be associated with the momentous revolution in the 
State before described. 

An occasion as well as a cause, however, is to be 
sought for any marked phase of mental activity ; and 
the nature of the occasion will determine the charac- 
ter of the phase. In this case, what we notice is a 
remarkable and sudden development of speculative 
philosophy, running in the old channels of theology, 
but widely overflowing its banks, and forming the 
head-water of streams that continued a great way 
farther down. 

And for this we find not one occasion only, but 
two. The controversy with the Adoptionists, which 
was carried on at Frankfort in 794, and determined 
five years later at Aachen, had served to launch the 
Western mind upon the shoreless sea of transcenden- 
tal metaphysics. In itself, the Adoptian heresy * was 
a form of Nestorianism which need not detain us 
here. It was developed in Spain by contact with the 
rigid and unimaginative monotheism of the Arabs, 
intolerant of mystic speculation ;f and had been car- 

* Making Christ son of God by adoption. 

t Another view, given by Peyrat (Les Reformat eurs au V2me Siecle), 
is, that the view of Christ called "Adoptian" — and, in general, 
the " Arianism " of the German tribes — was derived from no Ori- 
ental source, but was native to the Gothic races which now occu- 
pied the country near the Pyrenees. It was a view which might 
naturally take the place of their belief in Balder, son of Odin, who 
had suffered death from the machinations of the Adversary, but 
was to return as Prince of a coming reign of peace. In this view, 
Christ was not made out of nothing (as held by Arius), but was Son 
of God, so to speak, in the ordinary sense. 



DIONYSIUS THE AEEOPAGITE. 263 

ried over into France, to the perplexity of the priest- 
hood and the confusion of unsophisticated faith. It 
was easily vanquished in the church councils of that 
pious time ; but left a mental unrest that would be 
sure to show itself in some other way. 

That other way was soon found. In the course of 
the Greek metaphysical discussions of the Trinity, 
some three or four hundred years before, certain writ- 
ings had turned up, said to be by Dionysius the Are- 
•opagite, the one educated man at Athens that had been 
converted by Paul's address on Mars' Hill. Copies 
of them had found their way into France, where, tra- 
dition would have it, the same Dionysius had been 
one of the first teachers of Christianity, and was, in 
fact, the St. Denys whose name has rung since on so 
many a French battle-field. Very little was known 
of the contents, for these were in Greek ; and this, es- 
pecially metaphysical Greek, few scholars of that day 
were competent to understand. 

Among the rest, a copy beautifully written and 
adorned had been sent as a complimentary gift from 
the Eastern Emperor Michael to Louis, son of Charle- 
magne. It lay a good while in the imperial library, 
unread, — as presentation copies sometimes will ; and 
was overlooked in the disorders of Louis's unhappy 
reign. But his son Charles, who goes in history by 
the name of Bald, had inherited some of his mother's # 
brilliant gifts and his grandfather's love of letters ; and 
his court was the home of the most famous scholar of 
his age, John the Scot, known in the history of phi- 

* The Empress Judith. His medallion shows something too of 
her beauty. 



264 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 

losophy as Scotus Erigena, that is, Irisli-born * For 
the British schools of learning, and especially the Irish 
schools, had been out of the reach of storms that blew 
upon the Continent ; and we have already seen how 
the English Bede, Wilfried, and Alcuin had had a large 
share in kec piug up the tradition of letters in Europe. 

Of all the Christian Latin writers, Scotus Erigena 
was perhaps ablest up to this time, at any rate since 
Augustine, and certainly the most independent in his 
speculative temper. The poet, whose Lament I began 
by quoting, calls him " a man vain of speech, and gar- 
rulous, who has dared, forsooth, to define presumptu- 
ously of the Divine foreknowledge and decree ; dis- 
puting by arguments of philosophy, without reason 
rendered, or alleging any authority of the Scriptures 
or holy Fathers ; held in admiration, I hear, as a 
scholar and man of learning ; who possesses all his 
hearers and admirers with his empty wordiness and 
windy talk, so that they no longer obey the authority 
of holy Scripture or the Fathers, but follow rather his 
fantastic babblings." This language sounds quite 
familiar : the bigotry of ignorance, or theologic terror 
of free thought, could not be more neatly expressed. 

This famous scholar was set by Charles the Bald 
(about 850) to interpret the obscure writings of the 

* His was the famous repartee which illustrates the court man- 
ners of those days. As he sat opposite Charles at dinner, he 
offended the nicer code of French manners, — possibly, passing 
his cup once too often, — which led the king to say, " What is the 
difference between a Scot and a Sot ? " " Just a board's width/' 
he instantly replied. [Quid distal inter Scotum et Sottum ? — Tabida 
tantum]. At which the good-natured monarch laughed with the 
rest. 



THE DIONYSIAN WRITINGS. 265 

Alexandrian mystic who passed under the name of 
Dionysius the Areopagite ; and it is not, perhaps, 
unfair to ascribe the extraordinary freedom of his 
own speculations to the intoxication of that contact. 

Of the false Dionysius little need be said. He rep- 
resents a line of independent tradition, that had come 
down, parallel with the orthodox dogma, from the 
early time of Gnosticism. It cropped out in many an 
Eastern heresy. It had blended more or less in the 
theology of many who did not forfeit their place of 
honor in the Church. Origen was not held free from 
the taint of it. Synesius, the famous " squire-bishop " 
of Ptolemais, held his Platonism as dear as his ortho- 
doxy, and in his letters to Hypatia he addresses her 
as his teacher, his sister, his mother in philosophy. 
Particularly it throve in those schools of New-Plato- 
nists who tried to build up a spiritualized and diluted 
Paganism. Their hazy speculations, their incessant 
allegorizing, liken them to the Swedenborgians ; their 
ecstasies and trances, giving them direct visions of 
divine things, their animal magnetism and natural 
magic, are the express counterpart of modern Spir- 
itism. These acts, or nervous states, they had cul- 
tivated as part of their philosophic piety; and they 
make a curious double, reflex, or travesty of those high 
forms of Christian mysticism that have appeared from 
age to age. 

In form, the Dionysian writings are fervently, we 
might say emulously, Christian. Jesus is " a most 
divine and super-essential soul " ; the theosophic sys- 
tem they teach is the revelation of the Eternal Word. 
As we might anticipate, the Latin language reels and 
12 



266 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 

staggers in its effort to carry the weight of transcen- 
dental speculation, to find its way in the mazes of in- 
cessant allegory.* 

Of the four Books, the first is on the " Celestial 
Hierarchy," — one vast field of allegorizing on the 
scripture symbols of angels and archangels, cherubim, 
seraphim, thrones, powers, and dominions, that answer 
to the Gnostic genealogies. The second gives the 
" Ecclesiastical Hierarchy " : that is, not of ranks and 
orders in the Church, but (as I understand it) the re- 
flex or parallel, as it were, of the celestial order in 
variously gifted souls. The third, " on Divine Names," 
deals with such topics as being, life, likeness, unlike- 
ness, motion, rest, and similar abstractions, setting 
forth, in particular, that Evil is nothing in itself, nor 
produced from anything that is, but is pure negation, 
— a doctrine which seems to have had a profounder 
effect than any other on the views of the translator. 
A very brief book follows " On Mystical Theology," 
closing with an astonishing period, in which all im- 
aginable attributes are denied of the Universal Being, 
which is above all possible conceptions of human 
thought, as it is itself the crown of all things, f 

* For example : " Ut ascendamus in deif ormosissimam eorum 
simplicitatem per mysticas reformationes, et simul omnis ierarchi- 
cse scientias principium laudabimus in divinitus praefata religi- 

ositate et teletarchieis gratiarum actionibus Omnia igitur, 

quae sunt, participant providentiam, ex superessentiali et causa- 
lissima divinitate manantem." — Lib. i. cap. 4. 

t " Neque anima est, neque intellectus, neque phantasiam aut 

opinionem aut verbum aut intelligentiam habet quoniam 

et super omnem positionem est perfecta et singularis omnium 
causa, super omnem ablationem excellentia omnium simpliciter 
perfectione, et summitas omnium." — Lib. iv. cap. 5. 



SCOTUS ERIGENA. 267 

I do not give this as a summary of that famous 
scheme of transcendental theology ; only to hint what 
ranges of speculation were thrown open by it. The 
writings of the false Dionysius have been held to be 
the real fountain-head of the vast flood of Scholastic 
theology; and Scotus Erigena has been called first 
and greatest of the Schoolmen. I have not, however, 
to deal here with this line of speculation as a system 
of opinion. Of that we shall have more to say, when 
we come to the great age of Scholasticism. All we 
have to do now is to see its effect on the mind of the 
time we are dealiug with, — the reality of its influ- 
ence, and the nature of it.* 

That influence is seen not so much in the questions 
that come up for discussion as in the treatment of 
those questions, and the nature of the arguments 
employed. As a system of doctrine, Scotus set his 
opinions forth in his most labored work, a long philo- 
sophic dialogue "On the Division of Things," — a 
treatise of mixed logic and metaphysics. The exposi- 
tion of this belongs to a history of philosophy. In 

* An interesting example of the speculative temper of the day 
is found in the correspondence of Servatus Lupus, Abbot of Fulda, 
who writes to Gottschalk of the beatific vision, doubting whether 
we can sec the Divine glory in the resurrection with our fleshly 
eyes. "In this vision will consist at once our secure blessedness 
and our blessed security; and for beholding it, the Truth admon- 
ishes that the eyes not of the body but of heart and mind be made 
clear." These words are the very echo of the Dionysian writings, 
or of St. Augustine. A little before, he has been discussing the 
quantity of Latin syllables ; a little after, he sets pitifully forth to 
Hincmar the desolate condition of his estate. " We have," he 
says, " to wear patched and worn-out clothes, and stay our hunger 
almost always with garden-stuff and market vegetables." See 
also his urgent letters on the same subject to Charles the Bald. 



268 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 

the history of theology his place is known as the 
antagonist of Gottschalk in the famous controversy 
on Predestination; and a few words on this become 
necessary, as part of the general history of the time. 

Gottschalk was a Saxon monk, who had long 
brooded in his solitude over the works of Augustine, 
then of unquestioned authority ; until he startled the 
theological mind of the day by the fervor, almost the 
fanaticism, of his assertion of a "double predestina- 
tion," of the elect to life eternal, of the reprobate to 
everlasting death. This doctrine is, in moral tone, 
like that form of Calvinism w T hich we should call 
Hopkinsian, — a doctrine of unspeakable horror to 
those who do not hold it, but of fervid and obstinate 
conviction to those who do ; a doctrine which is the 
necessary logical result to all who hold consistently 
the view at once of absolute Divine foreknowledge 
and of an endless hell. 

Of Gottschalk himself hardly anything remains 
except his two Confessions, which consist of little else 
than a very positive statement of that one thing. He 
is spoken of in a letter from Hincmar to Pope Nicho- 
las, as " a man of high-strung temper (animo elatus), 
impatient of repose, fond of new phrases, burning with 
quenchless thirst of reputation, vehement and frac- 
tious." We should have called him rather moody, 
gloomy, and intractable. " He was condemned in a 
council at Mentz," Hincmar goes on to say, and " by 
their order severely beaten with rods." To that rude 
and secular clergy this was easier than a contest of 
logic. They would rather fight in battle (and very 
likely did), or hunt with hawks and hounds. 



GOTTSCHALK. 269 

Gottschalk, in fact, was far too confident of his 
opinion to trust it to the mercy of any logic. The 
judgment of God, to the mind of that age, was best to 
be known by ordeal. " Set me here," said he, " four 
vessels in a row ; fill one with boiling water, one with 
heated oil, one with hot pitch, and one with blazing 
fire ; and let me, to prove this faith of mine, which 
indeed is the Catholic faith, go into and pass through 
each one of them." This grim fatalism had its natu- 
ral effect, in wild despair with some, in reckless anti- 
nomianism with others. 

Hincmar himself, the great domineering prelate, 
tried his hand at the sad, impracticable dogmatist, and 
thought to bring him over by a compromise which 
taught God's foreknowledge and predestination of the 
good, his foreknowledge and permission only of the 
evil. But such weakness was not for Gottschalk, who 
chose rather to be shut up in prison, and in fact 
ended his days there, deluded by visions, his morbid 
temper made really insane, but sturdily holding his 
rigid creed. As with Calvin, he saw nothing in all 
the world, evil or good, salvation or damnation, that 
was not the express act of God. 

So, as the ablest philosopher of the day, Scotus 
Erigena was drawn into the debate. But, in oppos- 
ing Gottschalk's doctrine of arbitrary destiny, he 
opposed just as much the church doctrine of creation 
and the fall, of sin and judgment. His language was 
as devout, and his claim of authority as sincere ; but 
the whole dogmatic scheme melted away in the mist 
of his abstractions. True philosophy, said he, is true 
religion ; true religion is true philosophy. To him, 



270 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 

there is nothing arbitrary anywhere ; no room seems 
left for what we should call freedom, human or divine, 
only one broad " Stream of Tendency." Harmony 
with that is apparently the real freedom he asserts. 
That universal life, that flood of eternal light, pours 
with absolute impartiality upon all ; it falls on men, 
according to their nature, whether for blessing or 
curse. As a blind eye cannot see the light, as an 
inflamed eye is only pained by the light which yet is 
meant for blessing to all, so with the ignorant or sin- 
ful soul. " There is no misery," he said, " except 
eternal death ; eternal death is ignorance of the truth, 
and there is no misery but ignorance of the truth ; 
and where the truth is unknown there is no life." 

There is, again, no beginning of creation with God, 
and no end of things except that all shall be received 
back into the one source of life. In his own essence 
God cannot be known : his personality is simply " an 
act of man's imagination " ; the revelation of Scrip- 
ture is only figurative and symbolic. Existence itself 
is more and more abstract as it becomes more real ; 
in its highest form it cannot even be conceived. The 
divine trinity is Being, Wisdom, Life ; and to this 
answers the trinity in man's nature, — to be, to know, 
to will. The " division of nature " is fourfold : — 
1. That which creates and is uncreated, — the First 
Cause ; 2. That which is created and creates, — sec- 
ond causes ; 3. That which is created and does not 
create, — things as known in time and space ; 4. That 
which neither creates nor is created, — under which 
head will come the world of Evil. This logical for- 
mality is the groundwork of an immense amount of 



DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHAEIST. 271 

allegorical interpretation ; it is also the formal pat- 
tern, or type, of the ponderous discussions known as 
the Scholastic philosophy of the Middle Age. 

Much of the language I have quoted is familiar 
to us now ; but it was strange and alarming then, 
particularly in the inference which Scotus seems to 
draw. His theory denies the possibility of Evil, 
which to the common mind is the most real of exist- 
ences. His logic leads us straight to a pantheistic 
Fatalism, as that he opposed declares an arbitrary 
Destiny. Everything is swallowed up in the vague 
impersonality of Pantheism. All life is one. Human 
freedom is lost in the Divine necessity. Guilt itself 
is the only penalty of guilt. Nay, evil itself, of any 
sort, is only the negation of good : it is nothing of 
itself ; and, being nothing, of course it could neither 
be predestined nor foreknown. To which we may 
add, that it could not be committed, either. 

But our business is not with his philosophical sys- 
tem, or with the events of his life, which are very 
obscure ; only with his place in history. It is proba- 
ble that he took part in the discussion raised by 
Eaclbert's doctrine, that the bread and wine of the 
Eucharist are literally the body and blood of Christ ; * 

* This discussion (of which an eminently satisfactory account 
is given by Neander) opens in the period we have been reviewing, 
and embraces several names hardly less eminent than those 
already cited, particularly the great encyclopedist of the age, 
Rabanus Maurus, and the keen theologian Ratramnus (or Ber- 
tram). The doctrine, however, belongs strictly to the mediaeval 
system of thought, and will be more appropriately considered else- 
where. The same may be said of the discussion respecting the 
Forged Decretals, — associated with the names of Radbert and 
Hincmar, — which first appeared during this century (about 850). 



272 THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 

and one may imagine the cheerfulness with which 
he would bring allegory to bear on that great mys- 
tery. To him, the Eeal Presence is not in the bread 
and wine only, but in all things. The striking thing 
to notice is the positive and (as it were) unconscious 
tone in which he sets aside all authority except that 
of reason. " Authority," he says, " proceeds from right 
reason ; reason by no means from authority. All 
authority not approved by right reason is invalid. 
Eight reason needs to be strengthened by no agree- 
ment with authority." 

These are brave nineteenth-century words. It is 
likely that their reach and force were not felt then, 
whatever uneasy jealousy they may have stirred. It 
does not appear that Scotus lost favor in court or 
school ; or that the death he was said to have suf- 
fered — stabbed with styles (pricked to death, as we 
should say, with steel pens) by a mob of students — 
had any other motive than the sharpness of his dis- 
cipline. Some have called him " a saintly man 
through and through " ; others have carped at his 
fame, as " a liar, a fool, a madman, and a heretic." A 
glance through his writings shows a wide contrast 
between his purely intellectual method — whether 
we call it religious mysticism or speculative pan- 
theism — and all the church theologians from Augus- 
tine down. So that to us the interest in him is not 
merely as a scholar or a philosopher, the father of 
mediaeval speculation, but, still more, as the fore- 
runner, by nearly a thousand years, of the newest 
forms of transcendental free thought. 

I have spoken of the time of Charlemagne and his 



THE INVASION OF FEUDALISM. 273 

successors of the next half-century as an age of early 
revival ; and have indicated some of the causes and 
results that seem to justify this view. In one sense, 
the revival was not only early, but premature, and it 
faded quickly. Hardly anything seems left, a cen- 
tury later, of what had such vigor and promise. As 
when wheat is sown in autumn, the fields were green 
a little while, and then buried under a sudden change 
of season. The real growth, and the real harvest, 
came after the winter that followed. The change 
that passed over the face of society with the breaking- 
up of the short-lived Empire, and that seemed to 
undo the whole fabric so painfully built together, — 
nay, to overwhelm learning, religion, and morality in 
a common wreck, — we call by the general name of 
Feudalism, whose relations with the Church make 
the plot of the vast drama which we know as the 
history of the Middle Age. 



12* 



CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE. 



[Many of the earlier dates are uncertain. The mark f denotes the year 
of death ; >J< indicates the name of a Pope.] 



Emperors. 

c. 30. Augustus. 

d. 14. Tiberius. 25. Pilate in Judaea. 

30. The Crucifixion - . 
37. Caligula. Conversion of Paul. 

41. Claudius. Simon Magus. 

50. Council at Jerusalem. 
64. Nero. 

64. Conflagration of Rome. First Persecution. 
Death of Paul. 
69. Vespasian. 70. Destruction of Jerusalem. 

79. Titus. 

81. Domitian. Cerinthus. 

95. Persecution ; death of Clement. 
96. Nerva. 

98. Trajan. Edict against Secret Societies. 
100. Pliny in Bithynia : Correspondence with Trajan. 

Apostolic Fathers : Ignatius 1 115. 
117. Hadrian. Polycarp 1165. 

Gnostics: Basilides (c. 130). 
Valentinus (c. 150). 
138. Antoninus Pius. Marcion (c. 150). 

Apologists : Justin 1 168. 

Athenagoras 1 180. 
161. Marcus Aurelius. 

Montanism (chiefly in Asia Minor). 

177. Martyrs of Lyons (Pothinus, Blandina). 
Alexandrian School: Pantaenus f 202. 
180. Commodus. Clement f220. 

Western Church: Irenaeus (Gaul) |202. 
193. Septimius Severus. Tertullian (Africa) 1220. 



276 CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE. 

200. 202. Martyrs of Carthage (Perpetua, Felicitas.) 
211. Caracalla. 

218. Elagabalus. Christian Writers. 

222. Alexander Severu§. Hippolytus 1286. 

238. Invasion of Franks. Origen f 254. 

241. " of Burgundians. Cyprian 1 258. 

249-251. Decius. Persecution. 

•Novatian Schism. Sabellius 1260. 

Paul the Hermit f351. Paul of Samosata 1 275. 
260. Gallienus. Edict of Toleration. 
270. Aurelian. Captivity of Zenobia. 

272. Goths settled in Dacia. 
284. Diocletian (to 305) : two Augusti and two Caesars. 
300. General Persecution. 

306. Constantine. 312. Defeats Maxentius. 

Lactantius 1330. 
313. Edict of Milan. Donatist Schism. 
314-336. tfc Sylvester I. 

Arian Controversy. 325. Council of Niccea. 

Eusebius f 340. 
337. Constantius. Eastern Monasticism. 

Athanasius f 373. 
St. Anthony (251-356). Basil, 329-379. 
361. Julian (the Apostate). Gregory Naz., 330-391. 

364. Valentinian, Valens. 

375. Goths in Moesia. Gregory Nyss., 331-395. 

378. Battle of Adrianople. Chrysostora, 347-407. 

379. Theodosius. 381. Council of Constantinople. 

Suppression of Pagan Worship. St. Martin in Gaul. 

Ambrose, 340-397. 
395. Arcadius (East) and Honorius (West). 

Jerome, 340-420. 
400. 410. Sack of Rome by Alaric Augustine, 354-430. ) 

Pelagian Controversy. 
408-450. Theodosius II. 423-455. Valentinian III. 
429. Vandals in Africa. 431. Council of Ephesus. 
440-461. ^Leo I. (the Great). 445. Edict'of Valentinian. 
451. Huns : Defeat of Attila. Council of Chalcedon. 
Monophysite Controversy. 
St. Severinus in Germany. 
476. Odoacer. Fall of Western Empire. 

482. Henoticon of Zeno. 484. Schism of East and West. 
493-526. Theodoric : Gothic Kingdom of Italy (to 554). 
496. Conversion of Clovis. 
Merovingian Kingdom in France. 



CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE. 277 

500. 493. Gothic Kingdom of Italy. 

Cassiodorus, 468-563. 
518-527. Justin, Emperor of the East. 

519. Reconciliation of East and West. 
Benedict at Monte Casino, 529-543. 
527-565. Justinian. Reform of Roman Law. 
533-548. Conquests of Belisarius. 
554. Gothic kingdom destroyed by Narses. 
568. Lombard Kingdom in Italy. 

St. Columba at Iona 1 600. 
Gregory of Tours, 540-595. 
590-604. >Jo Gregory I. (the Great) ; Augustine in England, 597. 
"600. St. Columban in Gaul t 615. 

St. Gall in Switzerland |627. 
622. Mahomet (Hegira). Isidore of Seville 1 630. 

632-732. Conquests of Mahometanism. 

MONOTHELETE CONTROVERSY. 

668, 716. Constantinople besieged by Arabs. 
687. Pepin (d'Heristal) founds the Carolingian House. 
700. Bede (the Venerable), 672-735. 

711. Saracen Conquest of Spain. 
718-741. Leo III. (Isauricus), Emperor. 

Image Controversy. 
732. Battle of Tours : Saracens defeated by Charles Martel. 

St. Boniface in Germany f 755. 
741-752. ►£< Zachary. 752. Coronation of Pepin. 

755. Donation of Pepin (extended, 774). ' 
771. Charles ( Charlemagne), king of Eranks. 
772-795. t^ Adrian I. 774. Conquest of Lombards. 

Adoptian Controversy. 
787. 2d Council of Nicoza. 794. Council of Frankfort. 
795-816. ^» Leo III. . Alcuin, 735-804. 

800. Charlemagne, Emperor of the "West. 
The Holy Roman Empire. 
814. Louis I. (the Pious). Anschar, Apostle of the North, f 865. * 

843. Partition of the Empire. Feudalism. 
843-877. Charles II. (the Bald). Scotus Erigena f877. 

858-867. ^Nicholas I. Forged Decretals. 



INDEX. 



I. The Messiah and the Christ, 1-20. — The Messianic hope, 2. 
Chronological outlook, 3. Sources of the Messianic hope, 6 ; its charac- 
ter, 8. A national passion (parallels), 9. The Messianic period, 12. 
Sermon on the Mount, 14. Messianic consciousness of Jesus, 16. The 
entrance into Jerusalem, 17. The hope transfigured by his death, 19. 

II. Saint Paul, 21-46. —The primitive Church, 23; power of the 
communistic sentiment, 25. Conversion of Paul, 28. His personal char- 
acteristics, 29; his trials and contentions, 30; jealousies towards him, 
32; his death, 34. Writings of Paul, 35; his Christology, 36; his doc- 
trine of sin and justification, 40 ; his conviction of sin and assurance of 
salvation, 44. 

III. Christian Thought of the Second Century, 47-70. — A 
gulf of eighty years, 48; development of doctrine during this period: the 
Logos, 50. A longing for Redemption, 51; how conceived, 52. The 
Gnostics, 54; the problem of Gnosticism, 57; scheme of Valentinus, 58; 
failure of Gnosticism, and why, 60. The Apologists, 61; character of 
their Defence, 62; seriousness of the Christian mind at this period, 63. 
Relations to the Roman world, 65 ; calumnies against the Christians, 66 ; 
Montanism; results of this period, 69. 

IV. The Mind of Paganism, 71-99. — A Pagan Revival, 72; Cicero, 
73; a religion of the Empire, 74. Doctrine of the Stoics, 75; cosmogony, 
75; ethics, 76. Law Reform, 78. Persecution of Christianity, 80. The 
old Italian religion, 81; gods of the Nursery, 83; the great gods, 84; Rome 
as an object of worship, 86; her tyranny, 87. Peace of the Empire. 88; 
the Emperor deified, 89; formal worship of the Emperor, 91; collision 
with Christianity, 92; Marcus Aurelius, 93; degradation and decline of 
this worship, 95. Oriental superstitions, 96; sacrifices, 97; the taurobo- 
lium, 98. Ideas of Incarnation and Sacrifice, 99. 

V. The Arian Controversy, 100-121. — Accession of Constantine, 
100. Doctrinal development meanwhile, 101; analysis of the Logos-idea, 
102. Sabellius and Arius, 105. Christianity and Paganism, 107. The 



280 INDEX. 

method of Faith, 109. Character of Arianism, 110. Constantine, his 
character and circumstances, 112; at the Council of Nlcaea, 115; the Ni- 
cene Creed, 116. Athanasius, his adventures and character, 117. Re- 
sults of the Controversy, 119; the triumph of Orthodoxy, 120. 

VI. Saint Augustine, 122-145. — His doctrine and character, 122; 
his place in history, 125. Circumstances of his life, 126 ; terror of the time, 
127. His Conversion, 129 ; a reaction against Maniehaeism, 130 ; the 
Manichaean dualism, 131; a system of fatalism, 133; nature of the crisis, 
135; source of Evil, 136. The Pelagian Controversy; destiny and moral 
freedom, 137; Augustine and Pelagius, 138; issue of the controversy, 
139. The City of God, 111; time of its completion, 142; the ancient city, 
143 ; moral effect of the work, 144. 

VII. Leo the Great, 146-164. — Character of the period; a Pagan 
reaction, 147. Controversies of the Fifth Century, 150 ; Nestorius and 
Eutyches; the "robber-synod," 151. Character of Leo, 152; the saviour 
of Rome. 153 ; conception of his work, 154; the Council of Chalcedon, 156 ; 
faith in the destinies of Rome, 157; his ecclesiastical policy, 159; Hilary 
of Aries, 161. Creation of the Papal Power, 163. 

VIII. Monasticism as A Moral Force, 165-184. — Christianity as 
a conflict, 165 ; need of a reserve force, 166 ; enormous evils of Pagan so- 
ciety, 168 ; horrors of the Roman spectacles, 169. The martyr-spirit: 
Perpetua, 171. The ascetic motive, 173; Simeon Stylites, 174; the moral 
craving and habit of sacrifice ; examples of Eastern asceticism, 175. The 
monk Telemachus, 178. The monk and the barbarian, 180; Benedict (of 
Nursia) at Monte Casino, 181 ; the monastic vow, 183. 

IX. Christianity in the East, 185-203. — Contrast of East and "West, 
185 ; in language, 186 ; in political life, 187. Qualities of Eastern reli- 
gious life, 188; illustrated by. four gi*eat divines, 190; effect on the vitality 
of the Greek language, 192. Reign of Justinian, 193; his conquests and 
public works, 194; Monophysite and Monothelete controversies, 195. 
Image-Controversy, 196 ; forms of image-worship, 197. Mahomet, 198 ; 
spread and conquests of Islamism, 199; its strength and weakness, 201. 

X. Conversion of the Barbarians, 204-226. — A larger concep- 
tion of the Christian work, 205 ; a three centuries' campaign, 206 ; com- 
parison of Imperial and Papal Rome, 207; spirit of the enterprise, 208. 
The Barbarian as he appeared: testimonies, 209. Clovis and his House, 
211; the "Merovingian times," 212. The Conversions: examples; what 
were they worth? 214. Gregory the Great, 217; conversion of the 
Saxons, 218. Boniface, the Apostle of Germany, 219. Anschar, the 
Apostle of the North, 224. 

XL The Holy Roman Empire, 227-248. — The imperial idea, 228 ; 
Rome as it impressed the barbarian mind, 231 ; the barbarian conquerors, 
233; Clovis as Patrician, 234. Donation of Pepin, 235. Coronation of 
Charlemagne, 236 ; his conquests and administration : details, 237 ; his 



INDEX. 



281 



ideal of sovereignty, 240 ; reverence for his memory, 244. The period of 
organization, 244;' ultimate divorce and rivalry of Church and Empire, 
245 ; the mediaeval conflict, 246 ; later fortunes of the Empire, 247. 

XII. The Christian Schools, 249-273. — Partition of the Em- 
pire, — the loss to civilization, 249 ; its care for learning, 250; the classic 
tradition, 251 ; "the imperial Schools, 252. Cassiodorus as minister of 
Theodoric, 253 ; as a monastic recluse, 254. The barbarian mind; how- 
instructed, 256 ; mild doctrine of the Church, 257. The Yenerable Bede, 
258. Alcuin: his writings, 260; the Adoptian controversy, 262. Writ- 
ings of Dionysius (the Areopagite), 263; Scotus Erigena, 284. Gott- 
schalk: controversy on Predestination, 268; doctrine of the non-existence 
of Evil, 271. The intellectual development is checked by the invasion 
of Feudalism, 273. 



Adoptian Controversy, 262. 

Adrianople, battle of, 114, 120, 
148. 

iEons of the Gnostics, 58, 59. 

Alaric, 129, 148, 232. 

Alcuin, 260. 

Alexandrian Jews, 5 ; theology, 50. 

Ambrose, 120. 

Anschar, Apostle of the North, 224. 

Apollinaris, 150. 

Apologists, character of their de- 
fence, 62, 68. 

Apostolic Fathers, 48. . 

Arabia, 200. 

Arian Controversy, 100-121 ; civ- 
ilization of Goths and Burgundi- 
ans, 211, n. 

Arianism, 110; its drift, 111. 

Arius, 105. 

Asceticism, its motive, 175. 

Athanasius, 117; his adventures 
and character, 118. 

Augustine, 122-145; his character, 
123, 125; circumstances of his 
time, 126; his conversion, 130; 
controversy with Manichseism, 
132 ; with Pelagius, 137; the City 
of God, 141. 

Attila and Leo, 152, 233. 

Babylon, Jews in, 5. 



Barbarians, their aspect, 209; the 
barbarian mind, 256. 

Bar-cochab, 12. 

Basil (the Great), 190. 

Basilides (the Gnostic), 61. 

Bede (the Venerable), 258. 

Belisarius, his conquests, 193. 

Benedict, St., founder of monastic 
rule, 181. 

Boniface, Apostle of the Germans, 
219 ; his catechism, 221 ; his death, 
223. 

Byzantine Empire, 189. 

Caesar, 82, 88. 

Calvin and Augustine, 140. 

Cassiodorus, 181, 253. 

Chalcedon, Council of, 147, 194. 

Charges against Christians, 66, 67. 

Charity, what it means, 124. 

Charles Martel, 202, 234; relations 
with Boniface, 223. 

Charles (Charlemagne), 235; his 
coronation, 236 ; conquests and 
administration, 237; effects of his 
reign, 240 ; character and mem- 
ory, 244. 

Charles the Bald, 263. 

Church, causes of its early growth, 
25; its relations to the Roman 
world, 65, 92. 



282 



INDEX. 



Cicero, as representing Pagan 
thought, 73. 

Circumcellions, 173. 

City of God, 141 ; the ancient city, 
143. 

Classic tradition, 251. 

Clement of Alexandria, 63. 

Clovis, his convei-sion, 211; his de- 
scendants, 212; as Patrician, 234. 

Columban, his monastic rule, 215. 

Commodus, 95. 

Communistic spirit of early Church, 
• 26. 

Confessors, 61. 

Constantine, 100, 227; his charac- 
ter, 112; legislation, 113; at the 
Council of Nicaea, 115. 

Council of Nicasa, 106, 115; of 
Ephesus, 151 ; of Chalcedon, 116, 
156; later councils, 195, 196. 

Creed, Nicene, 116. 

Daniel, 4; date, 6; predictions, 7. 

Destiny and moral freedom, 139; 
Mahometan doctrine of, 201. 

Diocletian, 80, 114. 

Dionysius the Areopagite, 263, 265. 

Divinities of Pome, 84. 

Donatist Schism, 125, 173. 

Dualism (Manichaean), 131. 

East (Christianity in), 185-203; 
separation from the West, 186. 

Education a care of the State, 250 

Eginhavd (Einhard), biographer of 
Charlemagne, 240, 242. 

Emanation or Evolution, 58. 

Emperor (Roman), as a Divinity, 89. 

Empire, Peace of the, 88; ideal of, 
227 ; restored under Charlemagne, 
236 ; medieval, 247. 

Empire (Holy Roman), 227-248. 

Ephesus, Council of, 151; robber- 
synod, 156. 

Ethics of New Testament, 43. 

Eutyches, 151, 156. 



Evil, Pauline doctrine of, 42; 

Gnostic doctrine, 66 ; Manichaean, 

133. 
Faith, the method of, 109. 
Filioque, 120, 186. 
Formalism of Roman religion, 81. 
Fulda, foundation of, 222. 
Gnosticism, its early appearance, 

54; its character, 55; its problem, 

57; its doctrine, 59; its failure 

(cause of), 60. 
Goths, their victory over Valens, 

114, 120; their Arian civiliza- 
tion, 211, n. 
Gottschalk, 268. 
Gracchi, the, 88. 
Greek language, its subtilty, 186; 

its vitality, 192. 
Gregory of Nazianzus, 190; of 

Nyssa, id ; of Tours, 211; the 

Great, 205, 217. 
Henoticon of Zeno, 194. 
Herod, 4. 

Hilary of Aries, 161. 
Hincmar, 268. 
Huns, as described by Jornandes, 

210 ; their defeat at Troyes, 157. 
Hypatia, 148. 
Hypostasis, 102, 116. 
Image- worship, 197; controversy, 

196-198. 
Interval after the Pauline period, 

its importance in history 47. 
Islamism, 201. [84. 

Italian worship, 81; the great gods, 
Jerome, 209. 
Jesus of Nazareth, his messianic 

consciousness, 13, 16; his moral 

teaching, 14; the entrance into 

Jerusalem, 17. 
Justification by faith, 45, 137. 
Justin Martyr, 63, 64, 68. 
Justinian, reign of, 193, 194. 
Law, Roman, reform of, 78. 



INDEX. 



283 



Leo the Great, 146-164; his char- 
acter, 152; deliverance of Rome, 
153 ; faith in the destiny of Rome, 
157, 206; assertion of papal 
claims, 160. 

Leo, the Isaurian, 197. 

Logos, doctrine of, 40, 51, 76, 101 ; 
how interpreted, 106. 

Maccabaean period, 3. 

Mahomet, 196. 

Malachi, 3. 

Mani (or Manes), founder of Man- 
ichseism, 132. 

Manichaeism, 131 ; a system of fatal- 
ism, 133. 

Marcicn, 68. 

Mariolatry, 151, 195. 

Martyrs, 171. 

Messiah akd Christ, 1-20. 

Messianic predictions, 6; "hope, its 
chai-acter, 8, 11 ; period, 12 ; how 
transformed, 19, 37, 142. 

Miracles in the early Church, 23. 

Monasticism, 165-184; in the 
West, 166 ; its root in the moral 
nature, 175 ; monastic vows, 182. 

Monks as missionaries, 180. 

Monophysite (single-nature), and 

Monothelete (single-iviU), 195. 

Montanism, 69. 

Mythology : Roman compared with 
Greek, 85. 

Nestorius, 151. 

New Paganism, 74. 

New Platonism, 148, 265. 

Nica?a. Council of, 106, 115. 

Nicene Creed, 112, 116. 

Nnmina (functions of divinity), 84. 

Nursery-gods of Rome, 83. 

Odoacer (or Odovaker), 233. 

Ovid, myth of Numa, 81. 

Paul (the Apostle), 21-46; his 
character, 22, 30 ; person, 29 ; 
trials, 32; death, 34; writings, 35 ; 



doctrine of Christ, 36 ; of sin and 
justification, 40. 

Pagan virtues, 41 ; worship, destruc- 
tion of, 127. 

Paganism, Mind of, 71-99 ; revi- 
val of, 74; its weakness, compared 
with Christianity, 107 ; suppressed 
by Theodosius, 127 ; reaction, 147 ; 
its hold on the imagination, 119. 

Papal power, its growth, 163; its 
extent, 206. 

Paschasius Radbert, 224, 271. 

Pelagius, 137. 

Persecution of Christianity, 66, 80. 

Philo, 5, 50. 

Radegonda, 212. 

Redemption, the gospel of, 51. 

Religion of Rome, 86; it discour- 
ages emotion, 96 ; of the humbler 
classes, 95. 

Resurrection, 24; doctrine of, 64. 

Rome as a divinity, 87; taken by 
Alaric, 129; its spiritual and 
military empire, 206 ; how viewed 
by the barbarians, 231. 

Sabellius, 105. 

Sacrifice of Christ, 19 ; in Antiquity, 
81, 97, 99. 

Saints of the ascetic period, 175; 
of the missionary period, 216. 

Salvation, how taught by Paul, 45; 
the aim of the gospel, 52. 

Saracen conquests, 202. 

Scandinavia, how converted, 225. 

Schools, imperial, 252; of the ninth 
century, 261. 

Scotus Erigena, 264, 267-271. 

Second Century, Christian 
Thought of, 47-70. 

Second coming of Christ, 19, 25, 37. 

Simeon Stylites, 174. 

Simon Magus, 32. 

Son of God, interpretation of the 
phrase, 102. 



284 



INDEX. 



Spectacles at Rome, 148, 169. 
Stephen, martyrdom of, 28, 44. 
Stoic doctrines, 75 ; cosmogony, 76 ; 

morals, 77 ; failure of, 78. 
Symbol, value of, 104. 
Tatian, 64. 
Taurobolium, 98. 
Telemachus, the monk, 178. 
Tertullian, 60, 68; his testimony, 

79, 168. 



Thekla, St. 172. 

Theodosius, 120, 127. 

Tours, battle of, 202. 

Trajan, 66, 93, 128. 

Valentinus, the Gnostic, 55, 60. 

Vandals, 160, 194. 

Virgil, his anticipation of a golden 
age, 74; regard of him in Chris- 
tian tradition, 255. 



THE END. 



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ing to set forth the facts and considerations by which the most thorough and ac- 
complished scholars have reached their conclusions respecting the origin and date 
of the several books of the Old Testament, those conclusions are briefly stated, 
and the gradual development of the Jewish form of religion traced down to the 
Christian era. . . • 

The translator says that there may be those who will be painfully startled by 
some of the statements which are made in the work. In his view, however, it is 
far better that the young especially should learn from those who are friendiy to 
religion what is now known of the actual origin of the Scriptures, rather than to 
be left in ignorance till they are rudely awakened by the enemies of Christianity 
from a blind and unreasoning faith in the supernatural inspiration of the Scriptures. 

From the Providence Journal. 

If this Manual were not an exponent of Dutch theologians in high repute 
among their own countrymen, and if it were not an expression of the honest con- 
viction of Rev. J. Knappert, the pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church at Leiden, 
we should feel inclined to pass it by, for it is not pleasant to have doctrines and 
facts rudely questioned that have been firmly held as sacred truths for a lifetime. 
And yet one cannot read "The Religion of Israel" without feeling that the writer 
?s an earnest seeker after the truth, and has carefully weighed and diligently exam- 
ined the premises on which his arguments are based, and the conclusions which he 
presents as the result of his researches. . . . 

The book is one of singular and stirring interest : it speaks with an air of au- 
thority that will command attention ; and, though it ruthlessly transforms time- 
honored beliefs into myths and poetic allegories, it makes its bold attacks with a 
reverent hand, and an evident desire to present the truth and nothing but the 
truth. 

From the Boston Christian Register. 

Here we have, for a dollar, just what many liberal Sunday schools are praying 
for, — a book which gives in a compact form the conclusions of the "advanced 
scholarship" concerning the Old Testament record. Taking Kuenen's great 
" History of Israel" for a guide, Dr. Knappert has outlined what may be called 
the reverently rational view of that religious literature and development which led 
up to " the fulness of times," or the beginning of Christianity. 



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MESSRS. ROBERTS BROTHERS' PUBLICATIONS. 

THE RISING FAITH. By Rev. C. A. Bartol, 
D.D. One volume, i6mo. Cloth. Price $2.00. 

From the Boston Advertiser. 

The book in its drift is a sequel to the " Radical Problems " published last 
year; though it deals less with the mysteries of faith and opinion about which 
thinkers and teachers, earnest and thoughtful like himself, differ widely. . . . With 
a dash of his pen he strikes at forms of belief and worship which to him are nothing, 
or worse than nothing, but to many millions of the human race have been a savor 
of life unto life, and have opened the way of spiritual illumination, the reality of 
which no man living has the right to question. But after all, the reader, whatever 
his religious experience may have been, if he reads to the end, will find the reli- 
gious philosophy of Dr. Bartol resting on the deep and unchangeable foundations 
of faith in God, — the foundation on which all creeds and all systems must be 
built to be eternal. 

From tlie Liberal Christian. 

His book may not define the creed of the future, but it does better. It inspires 
us with "the rising faith." What a glorious faith it is! Faith in God, in man, 
in immortality. Faith in reason, in spirit, in character. Faith in the past, in 
the present, in the future. Faith in law, in order, in beneficence. Faith in hu- 
man nature, not as a finality, but as " a becoming." Faith in man's environment 
as admirably adapted to develop him into " the stature of a man which is that of 
the angel." Faith in liberty, but not in license. Faith in the pure marriage of 
coequal hearts and minds. Faith in forbearance and self-sacrifice as better than 
divorce-made-easy to solve the social riddle of the time. Faith in educated labor 
as the best solution of the problem of labor. These are a few of the " notes" of 
"The Rising Faith" which Dr. Bartol blends in his wonderful Fantasia. 

From the Christia7i Leader. 

It is the faith that Mr. Bartol has attained to as the result of his studies, 
observations, reflections for more than sixty years, following the apostolic direc- 
tion to try all things and hold fast that which is good. And certainly a great part 
of what he with his constant trying has held fast to will be called good by the 
large majority of those who are esteemed right-minded and sound-thinking men. 
. . . But above all things, the writer is true to his own convictions. These he states 
positively, clearly, unhesitatingly, but with all gentleness. 

He is certainly a Liberal Thinker, but in sweetness, candor, fair-mindedness, 
love of his fellow-men, patience with their errors and infirmities, shrewd observa- 
tion of their weaknesses, purity and spirituality, he should be taken as an example 
by all the Liberal Thinkers of our day. The book has a long life before it, if for 
nothing else but its literary excellencies. ... It will be cordially welcomed by all 
ths best intellects of our day as a valuable contribution to human thought, and be 
the text of many an essay for a long time to come. 



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Publishers, 

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Messrs. Roberts Brothers Publications. 

PHILOCHRISTUS: 

MEMOIRS OF A DISCIPLE OF THE LORD. 

Second and Cheaper Edition. Price $1.50. 



From Harper's Magazine. 
" Philochristus" is a very unique book, both in its literary and its theological 
aspects. It purports to be the memoirs of a disciple of Jesus Christ, written 
ten years after the destruction of Jerusalem. . . . Artistically, the book is nearly 
faultless. In form a romance, it has not the faults which have rendered the Gos- 
pel romances such wretched works of art. It is characterized by simplicity in 
expression and by an air of historic genuineness. . . . Theologically, it is char- 
acteristic of the era. It belongs to no recognized school of theology. The 
critics do not know what to make of it. In this respect, it reminds one of " Ecce 
Homo." It is not Orthodox, . . . yet he throughout recognizes Christ as in 
a true sense the manifestation of God in the flesh. . . . Those who are inclined 
to dread any presentation of the life and character of Christ which does not 
openly and clearly recognize the old philosophy respecting him will look on 
this book with suspicion, if not with aversion. Those who are ready to welcome 
fresh studies into this character will find a peculiar charm in this singular volume. 

From the Contemporary Review. 
The winning beauty of this book, and the fascinating power with which the 
subject of it appears to all English minds, will secure. for it many readers. It is a 
work which ranks rather with "Ecce Homo" than with Canon Farrar's "Life 
of Christ." It is associated, indeed, with the former book by the dedication: 
"To the author of ' Ecce Homo,' not more in admiration of his writings than in 
gratitude for the suggestive influence of a long and intimate friendship." 

From the Christian Register. 
Since " Ecce Homo," no religious book has appeared which can be compared 
with "Philochristus" for its power to nourish and deepen the interest felt by 
multitudes in the life and spirit of Jesus of Nazareth. 



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Ushers, 

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Messrs, Roberts Brothers' Publications. 

Aspirations of the World. 

A CHAIN OF OPALS. 

Collected, with an Introduction, by L. Maria Child. 

Price $1.25. 



From Mrs. Child's Introduction. 
As men become more familiar with each other by means of travel, emigration, 
rree institutions, general diffusion of literature, and mutual translation of each 
other's languages, the more they will become convinced that all men are brethren ; 
that God is the Father of them all, and that he has not neglected any of his 
children. The fire which sends steam-chariots whirling through the world is a 
mighty agent to melt away the barriers of race and creed. 

From Dr. H. I. Bowditch. 

The work, as a risumi of the past progress of the nations in religion, has 
been deeply interesting and instructive to me. It is written in a most winning 
spirit. The quotations are most convincing, . . . that religion is natural to man, 
and to be developed as other traits are, either well or ill, according to circum- 
stances, more or less under human control, and never to be eradicated from 
humanity. ... I know of no more beautiful subject to interest any human being 
in declining years than this. 

From the Chicago Tribune. 

The esteemed and venerable author of this volume has made a serious study of 
the different religions of mankind, and over twenty years ago published some of its 
fruits in a work on the "Progress of Religious Ideas," that has been commended 
for its research, and liberal, philosophical thought. . . . The highest advantage 
to b» derived from this devout anthology, to which all the world's Bibles have 
contributed, is the lesson it teaches in Christian charity. It shakes the founda- 
tions of history by showing that no religion contains the whole code of wisdom 
and truth, to the exclusion of the rest. In an introduction of considerable length, 
the author reviews some of the distinctive doctrines of the great religions of the 
world, calling particular notice to their many points of likeness. 



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Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. 



The Bible for Learners. 



By Dr. H. Oort, of Leyden, and Dr. I. Hooykaas, 
Pastor at Rotterdam. 

Translated from the Dutch by Rev. P. H. Wicksteed, of London* 

The Old Testament. 2 vols. i2mo. Price $4.00. 
The New Testament, i vol. i2mo. Price $2.00. 



" This work emanates from the Dutch school of theologians. 
Nowhere in Europe," said the lamented J. J. Tayler, " has theo- 
logical science assumed a bolder or more decisive tone [than in 
Holland] ; though always within the limits of profound reverence, 
and an unenfeebled attachment to the divine essence of the gos- 
pel. . . . We know of no work done here which gives such evi- 
dence of solid scholarship joined to a deep and strong religious 
spirit. The ' Bible for Young People ' should be the means to 
very many, both old and young, of a more satisfying idea of what 
Tsrael really was and did among the nations." 



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